


the best laid plans

by delizeita



Series: chaotic stupid [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Canonical Child Abuse, Crack, Emotional Constipation, Explicit Language, Fluff and Crack, Friendship, M/M, Nagini has a potty mouth, Parselmouth Harry Potter, Parseltongue, Slow Burn, Swearing, Unconventional Families, idiots to lovers, lots of swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:35:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27893932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delizeita/pseuds/delizeita
Summary: “Hello dickhead,”hisses Nagini."I am here to report your location and abysmally boring daily life back to Tom so he can find a way to kill you faster and more painfully. At least then he’ll give me more rabbits, because hunting is a pain in the arse and those nimble little carrot-fuckers are bloody  tiring to catch.”Harry stops weeding Aunt Petunia’s lawn in favour of staring at the giant python in the garden hedge next to him.It’s the holidays after the Triwizard Tournament, Nagini hates this whole spy business, and Harry makes an unexpected friend.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Nagini & Harry Potter, Nagini & Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Series: chaotic stupid [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1964668
Comments: 162
Kudos: 1284
Collections: Harry Potter Centric Fanfiction, Started stories





	1. Harry Potter and the Really Big Fucking Snake

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my fic where Voldemort is basically announcing he's alive and kicking and gathering his forces of mass destruction to commit muggle genocide and the entirety of Wizarding society is like "Nope, there's a completely reasonable explanation for this." 
> 
> Question: how far can Voldemort take this before they realise something is up?
> 
> Answer: very, very far. Start praying for them, bc they have no idea how completely and utterly screwed they are lol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s the holidays after the Triwizard Tournament, Nagini hates this whole spy business, and Harry makes an unexpected friend.

_“Hello dickhead,”_ hisses Nagini. _"I am here to report your location and abysmally boring daily life back to Tom so he can find a way to kill you faster and more painfully. At least then he’ll give me more rabbits, because hunting is a pain in the arse and those nimble little carrot-fuckers are tiring to catch.”_

Harry stops weeding Aunt Petunia’s lawn in favour of staring at the giant python lying in the garden hedge next to him.

Nagini continues hissing at him from under the leaves, noticeably pissed off. _“Aren’t you going to run away now? Humans are so stupid, always staring. I don’t even want to be here, so fuck you.”_

Harry has never really had much self preservation to begin with, and on top of that he’s in a bad mood, he’s hot and sweating and exhausted and hungry and dead tired on his feet. _“I don’t really want to be here either. And fuck you too.”_ he snipes back.

 _“You speak?”_ The snake looks visibly affronted, rearing up. _“What the hell, this is getting really ridiculous. Why the hell do all the Parselmouths I meet always have to be complete and utter dickheads?”_

 _“What?”_ he splutters, _“Hey!”_

 _“Well it’s true,”_ she muses. “And well, time to get the hell out of here, I smell the mini whale coming.”

 _“Wait up!”_ Harry calls after her, standing up to chase after her, but it’s too late, because he makes eye contact with Dudley from across the garden.

Dudley, who has just seen him speaking Parseltongue to a really big snake. Crap. 

They both freeze, staring at one another. Dudley takes a deep breath in, making his chest even more spherical than it already is. Harry is already running over, frantically waving his arms in some kind of last ditch effort to stop the inevitable. “Hey, Dudley, wait a secon-!” Too late. 

Dudley opens his mouth and starts screaming at the top of his lungs. “MUM! DAD! HARRY’S DOING SOMETHING FREAKY AGAIN!”

Vernon is on him in what seems like a split second, roughly grabbing his arm and his throat in a bruising grip with his pudgy hands and bodily dragging him inside Number 4, away from the prying eyes of the now curious neighbours. Aunt Petunia slams the curtains shut after reassuring them that yes, everything was fine, and no, they did not need assistance, and the moment she enters the house Dudley’s victorious smirk melts off his face into a blubbering fearful tantrum. 

He dramatically launches himself into Aunt Petunia’s arms like a fleshy bowling ball, eyes leaking huge crocodile tears. “He was talking to a really big snake again, Mum, like at the zoo that one time, but like, four times bigger,” Dudley blubbers into her arms, jiggling mounds of fat heaving as he pretends to sob. 

“I was so scared Mum… it looked like it was going to eat me... What if he sets this one on me too? Like at the zoo? I don’t want to die!”

“Get-off-me!” Harry gasps, scrabbling at the hands around his neck. He wants to yell back and defend himself, but Uncle Vernon’s grip on his throat is too tight, and all he can make is a sort of strangled choking noise. Something ugly rises in him alongside the throbbing of his neck and with a particularly vicious jab of pain, Uncle Vernon yelps and releases his grip like he's just been burned, jerking back.

Taking deep breaths, Harry stumbles away from him, massaging his throat with a single hand.

Vernon visibly inflates with unadulterated rage in front of Harry, face turning that familiar puce colour. _“Boy.”_ he spits, so furious he’s past the point of yelling. There are danger bells going off at a deafening pitch in Harry’s head, and he knows the outcome of this isn’t going to be pretty no matter which way he looks at it. “We take you in, feed you, and now here you are, you ungrateful freak, doing voodoo things in full view of the street!” His voice is rising in volume as he speaks, failing to contain his fury. “You...! YOU...!” he splutters in rage, fist repeatedly clenching and unclenching as if he cannot wait to wrap it around Harry's throat again. “DOING THAT? HERE? LAST TIME THAT HAPPENED YOU SET SNAKES ON DUDLEY! YOU THINK WE’D LET THAT HAPPEN AGAIN?”

Harry winces at the volume, fixing an eye on the door. He'd done it now. “But I didn-”

“Go.” Aunt Petunia's voice is deadly quiet next to Uncle Vernon's overflowing anger. Her rage burns longer and just as viciously, simmering violently beneath her horselike countenance. “To your room.”

She holds Dudley in her arms protectively, like she's afraid he'll attack them. His words shrivel up and die in his throat.

 _“Now.”_ Her tone is laced with the steely, quiet anger that Harry knows is pointless to argue against. 

He makes the slow walk up to his bedroom and bemoans the beginning of probably what is going to be the worst summer yet. Uncle Vernon tails him every step of the way and watches him with beady eyes, as if he expects Harry to make a break for it. Harry doesn't, if only to deprive him of the satisfaction of chasing him down.

He opens the door to his room and pauses for a moment. He's already exceedingly familliar with the battered furniture of his room from punishements in previous summers, but he has a feeling he'll be sick of them at the end of this. He doesn't have to guess to know it'll be a while before he's free again. 

A rough hand on his back pushes him the rest of the way through the doorway, making him stumble through the entry.

“In you go.” Vernon snarls at him from behind.

He risks a glance back at the open doorway, but he's too late. The door clicks shut, and Harry is alone again. He stands on the cold hardwood floor and can’t help but feel that little bit emptier with the sound of the locks snapping across the door, caging him in.

Harry sighs and moves to sit down on his bed. What he had predicted to be the worst summer holidays yet had officially begun.

_“Greetings, dipshit,”_ Nagini says, butting the window pane with her angular head. _“Let me in already. I want to see the inside of your den.”_

Harry buries his head in his pillow and ignores her to the best of her ability. It’s been four days since the Dursleys shut him in his room, and with the exception of a small toilet break in the morning and one in the evening, Harry hasn’t left his prison. He spends the days meditating and ruminating, doing his homework to the best of his ability and trying to keep his mind off the gnawing hunger in his stomach. 

They haven’t given him any food yet, but then again, he wasn’t expecting them to.

His only taste of freedom comes from his window. Even though he can't actually exit his room because he's on the second floor, he can still slide it open vertically and lean out, feeling a slight breeze on his face. It’s no help in the sweltering weather, but there isn’t much he can do about that. However right now, the windowsill is taken up by the bulk of Nagini’s body. She parked herself there the night before, and now, to Harry’s ire, refuses to move. She doesn’t do anything, but Harry keeps his window tightly shut anyway. As a result, it’s now swelteringly hot in his room, but there is no way Harry is going to open his window to Voldemort’s loyal familiar.

Nagini sits there, and complains. About him, Voldemort, his relatives, Voldemort, the weather, Death Eaters, Peter Pettigrew, and an entire cast of other people Harry doesn’t know, and Voldemort. She complains about Voldemort a lot now that he thinks about it. She is without a doubt the most sassy snake he has ever come across, not that he’s met a lot of snakes.

But, he won’t lie that a small part of him is grateful for her constant presence, even if he never responds to her. Being in a room by himself for long periods of time is grating on his nerves and metal health, and by the three day mark, he’s usually desperate for any form of human contact. Nagini isn’t a human by any means, but she soothes that ache.

_“Oi. Scarhead. Let me in, you little shitstain, I can see you’re awake.”_

Even if she does have a mouth that could rival a sailor’s and very _colourful_ vocabulary.

Harry sighs into the covers and rolls to face her, grabbing his glasses from his bedside table so he could see her. _“You’re terrible at spying, you know that?”_

_“Good fucking morning to you too, dickhead. And for your information, if I was actually trying to spy on you, you’d have no idea.”_

Harry snorts and goes back to ignoring her. 

Nagini continues regardless of his inattention. _“I don’t want to be here, thank you very much, and all the garden snakes can talk about is how shiny their scales are, so I may as well talk to the only other intelligent parselmouth in this entire neighbourhood.”_ She bristles her scales in annoyance. _“Blame Tom, that overly-dramatic piece of shit.”_

She leaves an hour later, grouching about the woes of catching rabbits in a suburb and the stupidity of humans.

Three days pass before he sees her again, and the Dursleys still haven’t let him out of his room. Harry feels like he’s going to go crazy from boredom. His nails are bitten down to the quick, his homework is done, and thinking about how crappy his life is just makes him depressed. The nightmares have become worse since the night in the graveyard, and now he sees Cedric in his dreams, and a pale wraithlike figure rising from a steaming cauldron. 

The lack of interaction with another person is really getting to him.

He’s thinking about the could-haves and should-have-beens and happier times he never had when Nagini shows up again. She looks distinctively fatter than beforehand, with a look on her serpentine face that showed something like pride.

 _“Anything interesting happen here? I guess not. Went hunting again, fuck, I hate hunting - it’s so unbearably boring waiting for prey. And on top of that, those shitty nimble little carrot-fuckers are a pain in the arse to catch.”_ She drapes herself over his windowsill again with a dramatic sigh.

It’s been a week since Harry has actually had a conversation with someone, and the only thing stopping him right now from responding to her is that she’s the pet of the man who has tried to kill him repeatedly since he was born.

But even so, Harry wants to talk to someone. Someone, anyone to alleviate the boredom he’s feeling. Hedwig is gone, he’d sent her out with letters at the start of the holidays, and when she’d returned with meaningless responses void of any actual useful news, he had told her not to come back unless it was safe. She could hunt for herself. Ron, Hermione and Sirius still hadn’t sent any more letters other than customary hello-just-checking-in-whether-you’re-still-alive-or-not mail. 

And now there’s Nagini on his windowsill, and her endless swearing is the only thing keeping him from snapping entirely. 

_“I caught two of those mice, but they do nothing at all to fill me up at all and only a single bloomin' rabbit. Fuck the city, this place has like no proper food, and the inhabitants are all posing dickmunchers.”_

Harry’s resolve snaps in two. _“Tell me about it. I hate it here as well.”_

_“Oh hoho, finally responding are we? Took you long enough, dipshit. But yeah, I hate the people here. Everything smells weird and your family are total wastes of space.”_

_“They aren’t my family.”_ Harry bites back. _“They’re just related to me by blood.”_

_“Woah, touchy much? I mean isn’t that what family is?”_

_“Shut up.”_

_“Fine. Relatives, then.”_

Harry gives her a glare before turning his back on her.

_“Tom had the same problems y’know. Blood related relatives were bastards. Didn’t deserve to be called ‘family.’ You two are more alike than you think.”_

_“Don’t compare me to that murderer.”_ Harry snaps at her.

_“Yeah, sure, whatever you say, scarface. But anyway, did you know that the lady in Number 7 is cheating on her husband with the bachelor in Number 9? Even though he has a face that looks like he got dropped down the stairs as a baby and an intellect to match?”_

Harry gives her a look that portrays exactly how much he cares about that.

Nagini must misunderstand, because she nods and seriously responds, _“It’s a fucking travesty.”_

Nagini becomes a near permanent resident of his windowsill, and Harry refuses to admit how much he enjoys her company. She breaks up the monotony that is his own thoughts and the unchanging room around him.

Dudley had been hitting the wall connecting their bedrooms at unholy hours of the night ‘by accident’. It’s made sleeping more difficult. On the plus side, it’s made Nagini more irritable, which makes her more talkative. Although he’s not letting her in just yet, he responds to her now, and Nagini, beneath all the snark and bad words, is a fountain of interesting information. 

Dudley, somehow, managed to catch him hissing at her by lying with his ear against the keyhole of his door, and now Harry is left with a fresh ring of bruises around his arm and on his back to match the fading ones around his neck, and a promise that he will rue the day he tried to set more snakes on ‘dear Diddikins’ again. 

Nagini was largely unapologetic, because _‘it was your own fault for getting caught in the first place’_ and _‘you get enough pity from everyone else anyway, dickwad, learn to share.’_ Harry is strangely thankful for her relatively nonchalant reaction. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

_“D’ya think I could have talked to the dragon in the Triwizard Tournament?”_ Harry asks her after she returns from another two day hunting trip. 

Nagini snorts. _“I’m sure you could if you tried properly.”_

Harry does a double take in her direction. _“Wait. Really?”_

“Although, from what I’ve heard about the task, it wouldn't have worked anyway.” Nagini stretches her neck in the direction of the sun. _“All those shitty oversized flying lizards ever talk about is how shiny their hoards are, so even negotiating would’ve been completely pointless.”_

_“Damnit. I mean, it would have been worth a try.”_

_“I heard that the little rat-shit Pettigrew betrayed your parents.”_ Nagini says one day. Harry’s stint in his bedroom was approaching the week and a half mark now. It wasn’t the longest he’d been locked up like this, but he had a feeling he’d be breaking that record soon enough. _“Fuckin’ coward he is. Would throw just about anyone under the bus to save his own sorry skin. Wonder what he would taste like?”_

Harry doesn’t hesitate. _“I promise to give you five mice if you eat him for me.”_

_“Make it rabbits and I’ll consider it.”_

_“Three rabbits.”_ Harry bargains. He’s sure she’ll be satisfied with that. Rabbits are way bigger than mice.

 _“Six rabbits.”_ Apparently not.

_“You just increased it!”_

_“I know. It’s seven now.”_ Nagini cocks her head and stares at him. _“And increasing.”_

_“Fine then. Deal. But you’ll have to wait until I get back to Hogwarts so I can use magic to catch them.”_

_“I want eight.”_

_“Nagini!”_ Harry sighs in exasperation. _“We had an agreement on seven!”_

_“What makes you think I give a rat’s arse about human customs?”_

_“Hey Nagini?”_ Harry asks one sweltering afternoon, lying on the wooden floor of his bedroom, _“How did you find where I lived?”_

The question had been on his mind for a while. He’s been chatting with her near constantly for close a week now, if only to stave away thr boredom and loneliness for a little longer, and he thinks they’re close enough to ask questions like that to one another. He doesn’t trust her, not by a long shot, but she’s good company to have around and he’ll take that over being by himself any day.

Much later, when Harry looks back to pinpoint how it all started, he can trace it back to this single question.

_“Long story short, Dumbledore’s an idiot.”_

_“Hey!”_ Harry jumps up onto his feet. _“Don’t talk about Dumbledore like that!”_ It’s only a halfhearted protest, fuelled more by obligation than actual indignant anger. When he thinks about the twinkly-eyed old man, Harry can still feel that familiar rage bubbling in his stomach, only slightly tempered by his own admiration.

Nagini ignores his outburst in favour of insulting Dumbledore once again. _“Doesn’t change the fact he’s lacking more than a few brain cells in his old age, that senile old dickhead. I honestly wish I could throttle him with his own beard.”_

_“Just tell me.”_

_“Tom wrote a letter to you.”_

_“And?”_

_“And? And what? That’s it, dumbass! It was so easy to find you it was almost insulting! The owl flew straight to you! However, you didn’t come out of the wards 'cause you wwere doing chores and shit, so he couldn’t brutally murder you. So he sent me. Can’t hurt you, though, and honestly, I wasn't planning to anyway.”_

They both fall silent. Harry doesn’t respond.

Later that afternoon, he silently opens his window, and Nagini slips into his room with a stream of profanities.

Sometimes, Harry wonders how this is his life. Here he is, quietly chatting in Parseltongue with the pet snake of his parents’ murderer, who is lying next to him on his bed in the middle of the night, and actually enjoying it. Oh Merlin, he didn’t want to think of what Sirius would say if he saw this. Harry roughly shoves the thought out of his head, and tries (unsuccessfully) to convince himself that he isn’t resentful that all his friends left him to suffer with the Dursleys.

Next to him, Nagini is animatedly complaining about Voldemort again.

_“-to me, he’s a bloody idiot, I tell you! I swear, if I was a human, I would bitschslap him across the face so hard but nooo, I have a giant-ass tail instead, which makes it damn impossible!”_

_“Why don’t you try poking him with the tip of your tail instead?”_ Harry suggests, thinking of all the times Dudley had maliciously done the same thing to him, jabbing him in the sides of his ribs with his outstretched fingers. It hurts, and the tip of Nagini’s tail looks sharp enough to make it hurt. Voldemort would never know it was him who suggested it.

With a hiss of laughter, Nagini slumps across his knee, tongue flicking in and out as she tastes the air. Harry freezes at the sudden contact, hands drawn into the air with a visible and instinctual recoil, hesitant about where to put them.

The pale orange streetlight from outside his bedroom window melds the murky green of her scales into something softer, something that reminds Harry of dappled light through a forest canopy just after sunset, silken and gleaming in fluctuating patterns in the dark of his bedroom. Gathering all of his Gryffindor bravery, Harry slowly, gently lowers his hand back down, and places a single finger on Nagini's brow. He holds his breath with anticipation and marvels at the smooth feel of her scales under his finger as he slowly drags it down her nose, stopping before he reaches her mouth in a careful stroking gesture.

As much as they’d chatted, she’d never actually rested any part of her body on him. Other than the occasional slide of her scales against his body as she repositions herself, or a bump of her nose when she really wants to drive a point across, so far she had kept her relative distance from him, probably detecting his nerves at her close proximity.

This time, she just lies there, angular head a comforting weight on his knee, slit eyes watching him as he gently runs a finger down her nose. _“It does nothing, I swear, the bastard has abs of steel!”_ she complains, dipping her head into his careful patting, silently showing her approval. 

And now Harry wants to bleach his eyes to remove the mental image that she has just created. 

Driving the image from his head, he instead focuses his mental eye on the contrast between his own alabaster skin and the elegant patterns lining her body, shifting and warping as she breathes. She's a kaleidoscope of colours, even in the darkness, studded with gradients of murky browns and viridians to pale golds and and ivy greens. They shine in the meagre lighting of his bedroom. 

_“I have a better idea,”_ he says and readjusts his seating position to he can stroke her more comfortably, _“Maybe research pressure points, then. It’ll hurt extra.”_ There is no way in hell Harry is passing up on this opportunity to get back at Lord Voldemort, even if it means he becomes even better friends with his snake.

Nagini looks delighted at the suggestion, but Harry doesn’t notice because he is trying to reboot his brain.

He and Nagini aren’t friends. Nagini is an admittedly terrible spy sent to gather information on how to hurt him more, and Harry is the mortal enemy of the one who sent her. If he lets himself believe that, Harry will end up more likely hurt than not.

_“Oi, dipshit, feed me.”_ the snake gripes from where she’s set up permanent residence in Harry’s dresser. She’s made herself a nest of his less-wearable clothes and sleeps there most days, when she’s not out hunting. 

Harry gives her a deadpan stare. _“What even could I give you? Even if I did, I would eat it myself.”_

_“Then make your handlers feed me.”_

_“You’ve seen them.”_ Harry sends Nagini a half-hearted sarcastic grin. _“What makes you think that they’d give me anything in the first place?”_

The Dursleys were still stubbornly keeping him in his room two weeks after his original detainment. At this point, Harry was partially persuaded that they were only waiting for him to crack and beg to be let out of his forced isolation. The joke was on them though, because with Nagini, he wasn’t suffering nearly as much as he did when he was younger. When he’d brought that up with her, she’d gone uncharacteristically silent for a split second, before breaking out in foul words and angered hisses. Harry, blinking rapidly as his eyes misted over at her sudden care, hadn’t missed the comforting press of her coils against his arm amongst the swearing.

Fortunately, the amount of food he was getting had slightly increased as his punishment wore on, but it still wasn’t enough for a growing teenage boy.

_“But they’re starving us!”_

_“Starving me, you mean. You can go hunting, but you’re just lazy. Even so, they have no idea you’re literally living in my wardrobe. They’d kill us both if they knew. And what could I do about it anyway? They hate me.”_

_“No.”_ Nagini’s eyes glitter in the dark of his closet. _“They_ fear _you.”_

Harry sighs. _“Yeah, I know.”_

 _“So put it to good use.”_ Her tongue flickers as she tastes the air.

_“And risk getting locked in here for the rest of summer? I’m really hungry, Nagini, and if I do that I’m going to either starve to death or go stir-crazy.”_

Nagini sighs and buries her head in one of his old shirts, ending the conversation.

Later that night, when she begins to whine about how Harry doesn’t even have to work in order to be fed, he gives her a cold sliver of ham from his soup to shut her up, and she balks at the taste, swearing profusely at the soup, the pig the ham came from, the pig’s mother and extended family, and the Dursleys. 

It’s not an apology, but Harry is satisfied.

She sticks to Harry like a magnet for the rest of the night, resting her head on his stomach and the rest of her body on the end of his bed instead of in the wardrobe nest she had made. It’s cramped, very much so, but despite the lack of space, Harry is grateful for her presence by his side as he sleeps.

Harry guesses that spying on his everyday life is even more boring than living it. Maybe that’s why she’s so insistent in teaching him Parselscript to pass the time. Sitting at his desk, Nagini half-draped over his shoulders like a giant, heavy, hissing scarf, she slowly directs him on how to write the different curves that form the written language, and what hisses they correspond to. 

They’re doing it under the cover of darkness, with only Harry’s battered desk lamp providing enough light to see the papers in front of him. At this late hour, there’s less chance the Dursleys will walk in on them together like this for whatever reason, and although his eyes are drooping from fatigue, Harry finds Nagini's weight on his shoulders keeps him grounded.

His sheet of paper is filled with what looks like chicken scratch, and under Nagini’s careful guidance, he manages to shape the curves like how she wants. The shapes themselves aren’t difficult to do, and she tells him this is because it was designed for ease of scratching on harder surfaces with a sharp object, like a tail tip or a single fang.

The lines are sharp and strong, straight or gently curving. It’s simple to write. However, the next step is way harder. Each sign corresponds to a single hissing sound or rattle, rather than a single letter as the alphabet in English. And there are a lot of different hisses. More than Harry thought possible.

It has taken him more than a couple of days to get the letters and their order in relation to one another correct enough to actually move onto the hard bit.

Parseltongue is a tonal language, in that it has individual quirks that sets it apart from other languages. The first hiss in any spoken sentence is a placeholder without meaning, creating a standard point from which to compare the following pitched hisses to and derive information from.

The written form, Parselscript, does not have that. The different pitched hisses in comparison to the standard are represented by different symbols, which, together, form the written language of Parselscript. Harry has a lot of trouble, considering that Parseltongue sounds just like a more hissy version of English to him, so it’s no surprise to either of them that Harry sucks at it. He’s getting better at differentiating between the sounds, but it’s still very difficult and he gets it wrong more often than not. Nagini is a surprisingly patient teacher.

As he buries his face in his hands after another failed interpretation of her pitched hisses, she nudges his shoulder with her nose in encouragement and foul-mouthed comfort.

_“Don’t worry so much, scarface. Tom sucked at this worse than you did at the start. It’s a Parselmouth thing.”_

_“I’ll get better with practice.”_ Harry gently pokes her on the tip of her nose with a finger. _“Speaking about Tom, I don’t think your owner will be very happy about you teaching me Parselscript.”_

 _“Tom is not my fucking owner!”_ Nagini rears up from her perch on his shoulder, making Harry recoil from her sudden ire. _“I am a free snake, thank you very much. I only hang around him because he is my friend, and shit at taking care of himself. And besides, he needs someone to scare his pet idiots into submission when he’s away or working. I merely listen to his suggestions. Sometimes.”_ Nagini sniffs, looking very insulted at the mere idea of being Voldemort’s pet. 

Harry hurriedly apologises, and Nagini visibly softens, huffing an acceptance punctuated with plenty of insults and swearing before settling back into her previous position around his neck.

They continue practicing Parselscript until the sun has risen the next morning, and Harry falls asleep at his desk with Nagini's comforting weight on his shoulders.

_“Why don’t you just eat that whale of a cousin? Little waste of space really deserves it anyway.”_

Nagini is on his roof now, resting so that the majority of her body is in the gutter on the roof, but her head and neck are poking through his open window. It’s a warm day once again, and Nagini revells in the many sunbathing opportunities. 

It’s been three weeks days since Dudley had first seen him talking to Nagini, and Harry is really starting to feel his restlessness in his bones. He’s moved his bed to the centre of his room, and has been running in circles around it, just to do something active. 

_“That’s murder, Nagini. Amongst humans, it’s very very illegal.”_

_“Bullshit.”_ She says slowly, enjoying the sun on her scales. _“Tom does it all the time and no one tells him not to.”_

 _“He’s a psychopathic dark lord without impulse control, he can do what he wants.”_ Harry retorts.

 _“Well, he was getting better last time I saw him, and I am literally half of his non-existent impulse control.”_ she gripes. _“It’s not my fault he keeps on being an egotistical dipshit all the time.”_

 _“Well, you’re doing a terrible job at it.”_ Harry pauses, curious. _“What’s the other half?”_

_“Whether or not it inspires fear and awe into the pathetic excuses of humans he calls his followers.”_

_“What about world domination?”_

_“That’s a small part of it. Probably would be more if he didn’t have to spend so much energy micromanaging those bumbling idiots of his.”_

_“You make it sound like they’re totally incompetent.”_

_“Scarface, you have no bloody idea.”_

The next day, the Dursleys release Harry from his room early in the morning with a list of chores as long as his forearm and enough threats to make sure he does it fast. As he scrubs the bathroom floor with chemicals that make his nose wrinkle, Harry thinks about what has changed in the past three weeks.

He’s happier in the hellhole called Number 4 Privet Drive than he’s ever been before. His body aches with hunger and fatigue, he’s lost five kilograms, and he has a pounding headache behind his temples, but Nagini has made all the difference.

With this, Harry realises that he’s coming to think of Nagini as Nagini, foulmouthed snake and conversation buddy, rather than as Nagini, evil murderer snake pet of another even worse murderer.

But then, thanks to her, Harry finds it difficult to view that same murderer in the same light as before.

Nagini regards Tom with a sort of fond annoyance and deep trust, and it’s confusing Harry.

He’s having trouble integrating the bullheaded, passionate and sometimes stupid Tom from Nagini’s stories with his own experiences with the raging, murderous psychopath that was Lord Voldemort.

He doesn’t know what to think of that.

He returns to his bedroom late that night, dead on his feet, once he is done with all the indoor chores. It was apparent that the Dursleys still held a grudge, and that was shown in the way they yelled at him to work harder and roughly pushed past him in the hallway. Aunt Petunia was like a drill sergeant on his back, threatening no food until he finished an unreasonable amount of the harder and more disgusting chores.

They were all indoor, so he hadn’t seen Nagini all day. It was too risky for her to travel anywhere other than the garden, the roof, and Harry's bedroom.  
Dudley had kicked him out of the shower, griping about wasting water, after fifteen minutes of avidly scrubbing himself down. Harry sniffs his hands with distaste. The smell of cleaning chemicals is still there, no matter how many times he washes them.

Harry doesn’t want to drive Nagini away with the smell.

He doesn’t have to worry about it for long though, because the moment the door clicks shut, Nagini is on him, dragging him towards his bed, hissing angrily all the way.

_“What in the flying fuck are they doing to you, scarhead? This is not healthy, curse that son of a bitch, you look like shit and they make you work like this? They’re not even feeding you properly!”_

Harry is too tired to respond, collapsing on his bed fully clothed. Nagini is still ranting, reared up at an impressive height, baring her fangs in protective, foul-mouthed rage.

Then, she asks, _“Do you mind if I uncensor myself for a moment?”_ and Harry blinks twice because _what?_

 _“You’ve been censoring yourself?”_ Harry stops blearily staring up at the ceiling in favour of swivelling his head towards her with wide eyes.

_“Yeah, this entire time. You’re an impressionable kid after all, gotta protect your innocence.”_

Harry doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that.

_“Well, go ahead.”_

_“Hem hem.”_ Clearing her throat, Nagini takes a deep breath, rising up more on her tail. And then she explodes. _“FUCKING PIECES OF MONGOOSE SHIT, I HOPE THEY ALL DIE HORRIBLE MISERABLE FUCKING DEATHS AMONGST THE ASHES OF EVERYTHING THEY HAVE EVER LOVED IN THEIR MIERABLE FUCKING LIVES, I WANT SO SEE THEM SQUIRM IN HOUSE-ELF SHIT LIKE THE MAGGOTS THAT THEY ARE AND I WOULD SAY THEY ARE OVERCOMPENSATING FOR SOMETHING BUT THEY ARE THE BIGGEST DICKS I HAVE EVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE TO MEET SO THAT IS CLEARLY NOT THE FUCKING CASE HERE I HOPE THEY DIE SLOWLY AND PAINFULLY IN A CHORUS OF CRUCIOS LIKE-.”_

At this point, Nagini runs out of air and has to take a break. She begins to move out of sight, and he goes to move to see what she’s doing before he feels comforting weight around and under his head.

The slide of scales around his head is comforting, which makes Harry slump back down again, into a strange mixture of blankets and snake coils. 

_“Are you done?”_ he asks. _“That wasn’t so bad.”_

She snorts. _“Of course not, scarface. Don’t be an fucking idiot. I was just warming up. I’m blocking your innocent little ears now.”_ Her coils tighten around his head, effectively holding him in place and thoroughly cutting off his hearing. He tries to struggle but he doesn’t have the strength to combat against her own.

He feels Nagini take another deep breath, ears pressed up against her sides, and watches her presumably continue swearing up a furious storm in inaudible angry hissing. 

He guesses it had something to do with how exactly the Dursleys would suffer before they died, in explicit detail, with very specific examples, with threats of a demonstration just to prove it. Or multiple.

When she finally releases him, panting with rage and expended breath, Harry is half asleep in her coils. She harrumphs, hissing something that sounds suspiciously like, _‘go to fucking sleep, dipshit’_ , so Harry does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Now Mr Potter, what did you say to Mr Malfoy that was so insulting that he now refuses to repeat it?’
> 
> Harry looks down and shuffles his feet awkwardly. “Because I may or may not have called him an ‘over-dramatic whiny little dick-munching ferret-faced dipshit’ before I hexed him.”
> 
> “Mr Potter!” Professor McGonagall chokes. “What- Where did you learn such foul language?!”
> 
> Harry grins. “I learned from the best, Professor.”
> 
> Later that night on the edge of the Forbidden Forest, Nagini tells Harry that she’s never been more proud of him.


	2. A different kind of friendship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry, objectively and subjectively, reckons he has a very sucky life. Nagini is along for the ride, and for the rabbits.

In the morning, Harry opens his eyes to moving scales and the rising sun. 

Nagini is slowly moving out from around him, obviously trying not to wake him as she slides away.

Of course, she notices the moment he wakes up. Nagini is observant like that.

 _“The hell are you doing? Sleep, you little shit! You’re fucking exhausted!”_ A smile tugs up the corners of Harry’s lips in response to her aggressive mothering. She takes notice and continues berating him, giving him a gentle whack with her tail. _“You’re going to drive me to the point of shedding with your stupid antics!”_

 _“Sorry.”_ Harry doesn’t know whether he’s apologising for worrying her or for everything else, but it feels like he needs to get it off his chest.

 _“Don’t give me that bullshit, young man, Tom does the exact same thing. You’re both very alike, you know.”_ She sounds snide, with a hint of that familiar exasperation he hears directed at Tom. With their different backgrounds and views, Harry never guessed she would ever direct it at him.

 _“Say that again and I’ll kick you out.”_ Harry grumps at her, throwing an arm over his face to block out the sunlight in his eyes. Nagini is slowly but surely worming her way into his heart, and Harry's not sure whether he likes this development or not.

 _“I’m an apex predator with fangs and you’re a skinny, half-starved and exhausted fifteen year old. I think I can guess who will come out on top there.”_ She sighs. _“You’re both overdramatic idiots.”_

They’re both startled by a loud banging at the door. Nagini spooks, rapidly slithering across the floor to hide her long body under his wardrobe. 

“Get up! Up! Up! Up!” Aunt Petunia’s irritated voice jerks Harry out of the originally peaceful mood he was in. Each word is punctuated with a hit to his bedroom door, making it rattle on its hinges. “The chore list and ingredients for breakfast are on the kitchen table. Eat anything, and I’ll double your chores.” she snaps, before walking downstairs, probably to go and check for the newspaper delivery.

Harry lies there after he hears her leave, staring at the ceiling, absently grateful she didn’t come in. Nagini’s tail was still poking out from her hiding place, and she couldn’t quite seem to fit it in.

Stretching, he slowly moves to get out of bed, feeling the aching in his muscles intensify with the motions. There’s a new knot that’s formed above his right shoulder blade, and the skin on his knees are still raw and aching from the amount of time he spent kneeling on them yesterday. Massaging the bridge of his nose, Harry notes that his pounding headache yesterday is still there with a vengeance, but has lessened slightly after a meagre night’s sleep.

Nagini is slowly coming out from under his dresser now that Aunt Petunia’s footsteps have disappeared down the stairs, still hesitant. She’s tense, Harry can recognise it in the cautious way she holds herself. He knows how she feels.

Of course, it’s only a scant minute of blessed silence while Harry’s rubbing the sleep out of his eyes before she’s off swearing like a sailor again. 

When he collapses in bed later that night, Nagini is there, coiling around his shoulders like a giant, sassy, pillow.

There’s a new ache in his left shoulder from where Uncle Vernon wrenched it with a beefy hand, and Harry can feel the familiar, constant gnawing in his stomach. It’s like no matter how much he eats, he’s still perpetually hungry.

Harry stays silent, staring at the ceiling blankly once again from his splayed out position on his bed. Ron and Hermione’s new letters were just as uninformative as the rest of them, and Sirius hadn’t even replied to him yet. The man who killed his parents was alive, growing in strength and out to get him, and Harry knows nothing about anything. Dumbledore was as cryptic and vague as ever the last time he saw him. He’s constantly looking over his shoulder, and it’s become a habit to have one eye watching the shadows like a Death Eater is going to manifest in the darkness if he stares at it hard enough. Cedric’s corpse is at the forefront of his consciousness, and just behind that pools the ever-growing feelings of self-doubt and self-blame. 

He’s not so oblivious to his own mental state that he doesn’t know that these thoughts are without a doubt toxic, but it’s hard not to think about these things. Number 4 Privet drive is a poisonous environment, and the people who live there are even more so.

Nagini had said he had something called survivor's guilt and probably a fair bit of paranoia, and he’s inclined to believe her the way he’s going.

His thoughts drift in darker directions, but the snake draped on his shoulders and supporting his head seems to know exactly what he needs, and begins to ramble on about random things, using his silence as an opportunity to rant about anything and everything.

Nagini rants about the Dursleys, about people, about cities, about Tom, about hunting rabbits, about the local snake population, about being a snake and Harry quietly listens, focusing on her, neither offering his opinion nor agreeing. She grounds him, pulling him out of his own mind.

Her hissing is strangely soothing, and once again, he falls asleep in her coils.

For the first time since the Little Hangleton Graveyard, Harry sleeps peacefully.

Nagini’s gone by the time Aunt Petunia bangs on his bedroom door in the morning.

She returns two days later, swearing profusely about foxes and rabbits and ‘spineless dickwads’. 

Harry is still being worked to the bone, but the vast majority of the indoor chores are finished for now. The house is mainly spic and span, however his Aunt has the pleasure of adding on excess chores whenever she can find something that is even a little under standard.

The Dursleys seem happy that the chores are finally being done free of charge again, and are slowly beginning to ease up on the worser treatments. Harry’s plate at dinner is still half the size of Dudley’s, Aunt Petunia never looks at him with any expression less than distaste, and Vernon still hasn’t lightened his hand against him, but there’s a miniscule improvement.

But beyond all else, he misses Nagini. It’s not the same, returning to his room only to be met with silence, to have the pile of clothes in the base of his wardrobe uninhabited and empty, the curtains floating in the slight breeze over the bars on his window. There’s no one to complain to or chat with, and something feels incomplete without her.

He’s only known her for such a short time, but she’s already made such an impact on his home life.

He hopes she comes back.

Regardless of her absence, his life marches on, albeit more unpleasantly. Tonight, it’s blissfully less sweltering the entire previous week, and there’s a welcome breeze ruffling his hair. Harry can feel himself getting physically fitter with his sudden workload increase after such a long time confined in his room, and the perpetual aches in his muscles from the near constant use is calming with time.

As a bonus, since the majority of the indoor chores were done, Harry was able to start work in the garden again, which he is able to complete at his own pace. It’s sweltering outside, so the Dursleys don’t bother standing over him to make sure he’s working at what they deem an acceptable pace.

Without his constant maintenance, the garden of Number 4 had fallen into disrepair. The hedges had apparently been possessed by a devil’s snare in the three weeks he was away, the lawn was now slowly being taken over by the neighbours' spikier variety of grass, weeds were running rampant and the vegetables were dying slow, miserable deaths.

He’s trying to revive said vegetables when he sees her again.

It’s a futile effort, and honestly, it was doomed effort from the start. The bloody tomatoes are wilted beyond saving, and he’s wondering how he should break the news to his Aunt when Harry catches a glint in the hedge in the corner of his eye.

He turns to get a better look, and is promptly bowled over by a very excited Nagini. At first Harry tenses, mind skipping to the Dursleys and oh merlin what if they see but dismisses it a split second later when he realises that Aunt Petunia is out with her friends, and she’s the only one with a neck long enough to crane out the kitchen window and see him here.

He gives his attention back to the snake, who is still vibrating with excitement around him, coiling around his waist again as she hisses.

_“-And then it took me another six hours to track it down, scarface, six! I was ready to eviscerate it by the half-hour mark but nooo, the little shitstain had hearing on steriods and fucking ninja training apparently, so it suffered a very, very slow, painful death when I finally caught him, the shitty little carrot-fucker.”_

_“Sorry Nagini, I missed the first bit. What about the rabbit?”_

_“Hmph. I was just describing the laborious efforts on my behalf that went into my gracious gift.”_

Harry startles. _“A gift? To me?”_

_“No, to the mini whale.” Nagini snorts in derision and mock disgust. “Of course to you, fuckwit, who else?”_

And with that, Nagini extends her neck to reach into the bush she came out from, and promptly dumps something very furry, very floppy and very dead on Harry’s lap.

He honestly didn't know what else he was expecting, given that Nagini was a snake and not a human, but seriously, this was literally the definition of a cultural difference.

A dead rabbit. Lovely. 

His first instinct is to get it off his lap, as one would with any dead animal, but he manages to disguise it as a jerk of his body which he hopes he can disguise as shock in the moment. But at his side, she looks filled with pride, and a sort of soft joy that he can see she’s trying to hide behind a confident mask, causing a sense of gratitude and warmth to rise from the base of his heart. 

_Oh,_ Harry haltingly thinks, _she really does care._ His eyes blur, and regardless of the risk of being seen by the Dursleys or the neighbours, Harry slowly reaches out and slowly draws Nagini in for an embrace, burying his face in her side.

__It’s a hesitant and unfamiliar movement for Harry. For all of the friends he has, he’s a stranger to positive physical contact after a lifetime with the Dursleys, and a reputation as a celebrity. Other than the casual touches from friends, the occasional bear hug from Mrs Weasley when he sees her or the affectionate head rubbing by the Gryffindor Quidditch team when he was younger, Harry has never really done anything like this before._ _

__It’s an entirely different form of courage._ _

__For a moment, he’s worried that she’ll reject it, either slipping away or making an excuse. For all that he fears Voldemort, right now, this fear of rejection seems even more paralysing._ _

__She hisses quietly in his embrace, and rests her head on top of his. Harry has to hide the whoosh of air that leaves his lungs in sheer relief._ _

__It’s awkward, very much so, with their different physiques and her scales and coils and his bony limbs, but he curls around her as best as he can, the only way to portray his thanks now that she’s struck him wordless. Harry’s glasses are lopsided against his face, the frame digging into his cheekbone, and Nagini’s sleek body is cool compared to the hot sun bearing down on them._ _

__He’s only known her for about a month, and he shouldn’t get attached, but Harry lies to himself all the time. He cares too much, he knows that, and now he’s gone and done it anyway._ _

__He pulls away after a few seconds (too few, his mind whispers), to stare down at the cool corpse of the rabbit in his lap._ _

_“Thank you Nagini. Really.”_ he hisses at her. 

_“What are you looking at scarface, you look even skinnier than the last time I saw you.”_

__Nagini is looking at him expectantly and Harry looks at her, then at the rabbit in his lap, and then at her again, and then at the rabbit. It dawns on him more slowly than it should and Harry nearly chokes on the laughter rising in him._ _

__She wants him to eat a dead rabbit. Sweet of her, really, but wow, Harry never thought this would ever happen to him._ _

_“Nagini, I couldn't!”_ he yelps, _“You’ve put so much time and effort into catching it for me, and I’d feel bad! The Dursleys have been feeding me more while you were gone.”_

She gives him a disbelieving look that clearly says ‘yeah right, dickhead’, so Harry continues, _“Besides, I can’t eat it anyway! Humans can’t eat things whole like snakes do, and if I move to go get cutlery or something to cut it up, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia will find out and take it away!”_

__Harry spends the next ten minutes persuading her that yes, it’s fine if she eats it and no, humans cannot eat whole rabbits and yes, it’s all his relatives' fault because they like it when he’s unhappy. He has no regrets heaping all the blame on them whatsoever. He still feels bad about her present although there's nothing he can do about that._ _

__Later that afternoon, she somehow finds a way into the roof despite her bulk, and discovers the wonder that is muggle television. Of course, she loves it._ _

__It’s just unfortunate that Dudley was watching a show about tank warfare and gunfights of all things at the time, because now she won’t shut up about the ‘muggle metal peashooters’._ _

__Dudley wasn’t even supposed to be watching something like that in the first place, because Aunt Petunia had made it very clear that shows like that were ‘too violent for her poor innocent Diddykins’ and had forbade him from watching them. She’d even managed to glare Uncle Vernon into submission about the subject. But Dudley, being the leader of his own little gang now, saw himself as a beach-ball shaped cool kid who was clearly mature enough to watch violent shows on the television._ _

__So now, Harry has more blackmail on Dudley and a three meter-long venomous python who apparently wants a sub-automatic machine gun for Christmas._ _

Staying at Privet Drive is more tolerable with Nagini around, but there are some things that don’t change.

The feeling is back again. It gnaws at his insides; settles at the pit of his stomach and refuses to abate in intensity no matter what he does. 

The familiar feeling of wanting to run is back again. It’s an endless restlessness that plagues him every time he stays with the Dursleys. It’s the knowledge that the Dursleys don’t love him, don’t like him and never will. That children should be raised like Dudley, and not like him. It’s the knowledge that he has money and support and friends and that _he deserves better than this._

He bites it down every time because Voldemort is after him and this is the only place he’ll be safe. It just so happens that it’s a place he’ll never be welcome. It gets stronger when he goes to the park and sees parents playing with their children, exchanging gentle caresses and casual smiles without hesitation or fear. His heart aches when he hears Ron whining about his fussy mother overstuffing his school truck with enough spare socks to drown Dobby, or Hermione telling them about the new book on muggle psychology her father gifted her for her birthday.

Since Hogwarts, the knowledge that there is someplace else for him to be, someplace where he can claim to belong, has made the long hours locked in his room or slaving away for the Dursleys that little bit more unbearable.

Nagini delays it with her constant company, but she is only a temporary reprieve to the next wave. Like an incoming tide, it ebbs and flows, gradually creeping forward regardless.

It’s making him restless.

It’s another sunny day when Nagini first suggests he joins Voldemort. Out of all the chores he needs to do in the garden, it’s pruning the hedges which he likes the most, so that’s what he spends the majority of his time procrastinating on. Chatting with the giant snake who is hiding in them makes it much less of a chore.

That morning, he had received more letters from Ron, Hermione and Sirius, all useless in comforting him and assuaging his worries. 

He consciously has to resist the urge to run them through Aunt Petunia’s pristine food processor that she’d bought to make healthier smoothies. Now though, it was collecting dust because Dudly whined loud and long enough to drive the point home that fruit smoothies tasted bad, alongside other healthy food in general.

Now, if they continued sending him these ‘steaming piles of shit’ (as Nagini put it), Harry would have another purpose for it altogether.

And then she just casually suggests that Tom wouldn’t let him deal with this kind of crap, and that once she bites him into submission, they’d make a great team, really.

Once Harry had finished coughing his lungs out, having choked on his own spit in surprise, he makes an effort to send her the most disbelieving grin he’s ever given to another living being, other than the special one he sends Dudley when his cousin says that he’s going on a diet (again).

 _“So,”_ Harry clears his throat again, still recovering from his earlier cough fit, _“You think I should become buddies with Lord Voldemort and we should take over the Wizarding World together.”_

_“Exactly.”_ Nagini preens, and Harry doubts her intelligence once again as she says, _“You two would make a fuckin’ awesome team. Terrifying, but awesome.”_

_“There are so many things wrong with that image, I’m not even going to bother replying.”_

_“Fuck that! I want both of my favourite humans to meet one another!”_

Harry abruptly stops pruning the hedge. _“I’m one of your favourite humans?”_ he whispers, fingers whitening as they tense around the pruning shears he’s currently holding.

Nagini looks away and wriggles awkwardly, not making eye contact with him. _“I’ll bite you, dipshit. I’m deadly serious.”_

Harry breaks out in a grin. _“Thanks, Nagini.”_

She sniffs the air, stretching her neck. _“Well, moving on, if those imbeciles won’t give you any decent information, I have some even better advice.”_

_“And what is that ‘even better advice?’”_ Harry hacks through a stubborn branch sticking irregularly out of the hedge with the shears. 

_“Get a tattoo. Ultimate sign of teenage rebellion.”_

_“Nagini,_ no. _”_

The holidays pass as slowly as they ever do, but they’re noticeably much less painful than the previous ones.

The work is still hard, but it’s easing off gradually, and he gets to spend more and more time wandering the neighbourhood with Nagini as the initial malicious joy the Dursleys get from seeing him working for them as a slave is replaced by their usual disdain. 

They fall into an easy routine. Nagini hangs around him most days, whining and complaining like the world will end if she doesn’t tell someone how much this very specific thing pisses her off. She’s annoyingly perceptive at the best of times, but can be equally as oblivious at the turn of a hat. Harry thinks it’s a snake thing. Every week or so, she will disappear for two or three days at a time, coming back looking a bit fatter. Those days are the worst for Harry.

Nagini adds the milkman to her rapidly growing To Kill List. Harry has no idea why, and he doesn’t really want to ask. At this point in time, Harry’s pretty sure that nearly most of Little Whinging is on it, including all of Mrs Figg’s cats and the ‘barky little shit’ that the residents of Number 7 have recently adopted from the pet store.

Also, she drags in another fat rabbit through his window, and all Harry can do is pray that it doesn’t become a common occurrence.

News from the Wizarding world is difficult to get a hold of, with Hedwig off somewhere safer than here when she isn’t dropping him more uninformative letters and Dudley throwing stones at every owl he sees in the neighbourhood to drive them away.

But with Harry’s latest stint in his bedroom over, Hedwig has returned looking well fed and satisfied, a copy of the Daily Prophet tied to her leg. She affectionately nips his finger with her beak as he detaches it from her leg, and her almost fond expression makes him smile.

With that, he grabs his glasses from his bedside table and when his vision comes into focus, the snake has followed, resting her head on his shoulder with her body trailing down the length of his bed and onto the floor.

The slightly moist copy of the Daily Prophet in his hands is the first one he’s actually been able to get his hands on now that Hedwig had returned, but Harry doesn’t really care about that. It’s legible, barely in some parts, but that does nothing to assuage the horror that rises in him when he finally reads through the trash, from cover to cover.

There’s nothing on Voldemort’s return at all, nothing whatsoever, and nobody believes that he is back at all. Reading the subtle jibes into his own supposed ‘attention-seeking’ behaviour or ‘untruthful stories’ claims makes him crease the paper in his grip. 

With every mention of ‘a story worthy of Harry Potter’ or comparison to ‘another attention-seeker we all know’, Harry has to physically force himself to read the rest of the paper.

__It’s useless. Worse than the letters he’s getting from Ron, Hermione and Sirius combined, and twice as uninformative._ _

At least they had food packages attached.

On the positive side, he’s found a new use for Aunt Petunia’s food processor. He was going to blend the crap out of that rag, consequences and Aunt Petunia’s smoothies be damned.

He eagerly does it once the Dursleys have left to go and ‘do normal activities, like normal people’. Uncle Vernon is at work, and Aunt Petunia has taken Dudley over to a friend’s place for a ‘playdate’.

“It’s not a playdate!” Dudley had snarled at Harry when he’d brought it up, “We’re hanging out!”

“Sure.” Harry had replied, giving him a condescending 'how is this child still alive with this level of intelligence' expression, one worthy of Nagini. “Of course it’s not a playdate, Diddikins.”

Dudley had yelled for his mother, and Harry had been stuck scrubbing out the mould in the showers mere minutes later. He guesses he’s more petty than expected, because he originally had no regrets ruining her blender by making a paper smoothie, but now he’s also hoping that her pot plants die miserable slow deaths and that Dudley sits on her reading glasses.

If Harry helps along those events, he’s not saying anything.

Nagini, the world’s best stress relief buddy, complains to him about it as he gleefully takes out his anger on the paper. The sound of it shredding is grating on his ears, but the satisfaction it brings is completely worth it.

_“They’re all dumbasses, honestly. I mean, I’m a fucking snake and it’s really, really obvious. There is no way that shitstorm of a tournament didn’t become like that without outside help. I mean, you of all people got entered.”_

Harry decides to add water to the remnants of the newspaper on a whim, which makes the mix inside sort of gloop together. He hopes that if he adds enough newspaper, it’ll stick to the sides and the blade like dough.

 _“Yes,”_ he hisses, that familiar anger rising at the thought of the rubbish they’d written about him, _“And what other explanation is there? Barty Crouch Junior admitted under Veritaserum that he was bringing the Dark Lord back!”_ On a whim, Harry rummages through the cooking drawers with one hand, holding the whirring food processor on the bench in the other. Since no one but him used the baking drawer (his cousin and uncle were too lazy to bake something, and preferred the store bought things, while his aunt often couldn’t be bothered to cook anything else other than the bare necessities), it was neatly organised, different ingredients in neat containers and sections, so it was simple to find what he needed.

 _“Ha, you think? Crouchy got the Kiss, didn’t he? No one’ll be asking him anything anytime soon and even if they could, the Ministry wouldn't let anyone know about it.”_ Nagini retorts, _“You’ve only got a senile old fool backing you up, and that twinklefucker is in hot water right now. And there’s only so much help he can give.”_

With a wide flourish, he adds bits of red and green food colouring, noting with angry satisfaction when the mixture turns a rich brown colour. It looks like shit, and Harry feels oddly satisfied now that the Prophet’s outside appearance matched its contents.

_“The media’s coming after you, scarface, and you know it. It’s only a matter of time before the Ministry does too.”_

Harry vents out his growing anger on the newspaper in the blender. As expected, paper gets stuck in the blades, but Harry has no qualms using what he can scrape from the bottom as fertiliser for Aunt Petunia’s long-dead tomatoes.

 _“I hate this.”_ He hisses to her again. _“I hate all of this.”_ Standing on a stool to reach over the bench digging into his thigh, Harry aggressively dumps the mess in the blender straight out the kitchen window and into the tomato garden. It looks just like manure.

 _“The entire Ministry is complete bullshit.”_ She states like it's blatantly obvious, and Harry somehow hasn’t yet caught the drift.

 _“I know.”_ he says. He really does. They’ve never been reliable from the start, and after the disaster that was the Triwizard tournament and the entire Sirius Black fiasco, Harry thinks he’s only just starting to see just how whimsical and fallible the Wizarding world is. 

It's moments like these when Harry struggles to love the Wizarding World.

How was it that Sirius Black, the only heir of a noble pureblood house, charged with a crime which had determined the turning point of the war, was denied truth serum to prove his own innocence or extract additional information?

There’s the discrimination against magical creatures, the entire muggleborn versus pureblood debate, the issue of muggles and technological developments, and a hierarchy based on lineage. Also, the existence of Azkaban in general - because surely sending criminals to a gloomy island without basic necessities and inhabited by creatures who suck out hope itself should be extremely illegal, right? The media is controlled by a single company without any reputable competition, providing the entirety of the British Wizarding World a single source of biased information under the direct control of the government, unhindered by morals or journalistic integrity, leaving it free to lash out and ruin livelihoods for the entertainment of the masses. 

And right now, he’s in their crosshairs.

It’s been bad in the past and is bad at the moment, but he has a sinking feeling in his gut he hasn’t hit rock bottom yet.

She sighs. _“Just join us already, what the hell. See why Tom wants to overythrow these idiots in charge now?”_

 _“He murdered my parents, so no.”_ Harry shuts her down instantly, scraping the last remains of Prophet puree into the tomato garden. _“But hey,”_ he jokes, _“I might consider it if he makes the authors of the Prophet become taste testers for all the Weasley twins’ experimental creations.”_

_“...From what you’ve told me about those tricksters, I think they’d rather throw themselves off the Astronomy Tower at Hogwarts.”_

Harry sniggers at her, pulling himself back through the window. _“The Wizarding World is completely bonkers at the best of times.”_

The tap water is removing the majority of the mess in the blender but there are some bits that won’t move, so he has to reach over the sink to grab the brush. Nagini watches him silently as he scrubs out the inside of the food processor.

They’re both quiet until they hear the sound of Aunt Petunia’s car entering the driveway.

Sighing, Harry puts away the food processor and dyes, and washes the last scraps of mushy paper down the sink, hiding the evidence. He motions to Nagini, who slides over the benchtop to set herself on his shoulders. Picking up the rest of her tail in both arms with ease, having done the same thing many times before, he carries her to his room as the sound of the door unlocking echoes behind them.

He closes the door behind them and prepares for another evening of pretending to be invisible, once again.

 _“You know, lately I’ve been wondering what it’ll take for them all to realise he’s back.”_ he says to the snake on his shoulder, bedroom door closing behind him with a sharp click.

Nagini hums in thoughtful agreement, sending vibrations down his neck, and they both lapse into silence again.

He sets her down in her nest in his dresser, and throws himself onto his bed, rolling over in his back to face the ceiling. He’s long since memorised every divot and watermark that patterns it. 

Muffled banging sounds from downstairs, and Dudley’s laughter echoes through the hallway alongside Aunt Petunia’s own muffled laugh. He hears them turn on the television, voices distorted into a series of meaningless happy-sounding jumble through the walls. Harry absently wonders how long it will take her to start yelling at him to make dinner for them.

His question is answered when Uncle Vernon comes home later, and the rich aroma of Chinese takeout wafts through the house. His deep voice joins the clamour that is the television, Aunt Petunia and Dudley, voices reaching happy pitches and lulls that never happen around Harry. They’re happy without him, again.

It’s worse than when he was locked in his room after the Nagini incident, because now he has the choice to join them or not, and he knows that he’s not welcome in their perfect little family.

Harry doesn’t even begin to pretend that they’re missing him. 

He hopes that Ron and Hermione miss him as much as he misses them, despite the pitiful amount of mail they’ve sent so far. Sirius was another story entirely. It almost aches how much Harry wants to see him and be taken away to live elsewhere together, far away from the pristine normality of Privet Drive. He’s the means to fulfill Harry's nearly tangible dream of a family who loves him for who he is. 

Harry stares at the ceiling and counts its imperfections once more, with the smell of takeout food in his nostrils, the laughter of a family without him in his ears and the knowledge that he’s been abandoned here by everyone he’s ever trusted enough to tell about the Dursleys.

From the years he’s spent with only himself as company, whether it be in forced isolation in his cupboard or room or a result of public opinion about his own celebrity status making him a social pariah, Harry knows his own mental state well enough to recognise when he is beginning to spiral.

It’s a nonlinear process. 

There are good days, there are worse days, and then there are days in which Harry Potter still hasn’t left the dark of the cupboard under the stairs.

He knows from experience that yesterday was a good day. He did the chores quietly and got ignored completely by the Dursleys, and he didn’t feel like he was suffocating as he lay in bed awake at night.

Today is turning out to be a bad one. The Prophet, for one reason. And now his own morose thoughts are dragging him down even further.

And now, the meagre light from the window is blocked as it moves out of reach and the room shrinks to an unbearable size. The ceiling shakes like Dudley is running down the stairs and Harry struggles to see his own hands in front of his face in the all-encompassing darkness.

Downstairs, the television is lit up and airing reruns to a film series he’ll never get the chance to see if he stays here.

Nagini may be in the same room as he is, but right now he feels so very alone.

The curtain sways, the lamp dims.

When Harry turns his head to look out the window, phantom metal rungs partially block out the night sky.

_“I’m not joining him.”_ Harry slams his Charms textbook shut, emphasising his point.

 _“I’m being deadly fucking serious right now, so tell me one thing that Dumbledore has that Tom doesn’t.”_ Nagini rears up, fixing him with a challenging look.

 _“Morals.”_ Harry deadpans. _“A clean criminal record.”_

 _“Well, that’s debatable.”_ she snorts. _“I’ll tell you all about your beloved headmaster later. I have a rant and a half saved up especially for that old bag of dicks. Anything else?”_

He thinks for a moment.

 _“A nose?”_ he says. Because honesty is a virtue.

Nagini flounders for a response to that one, and Harry revels in the sensation of rendering her speechless for once. It gives him a very strange sense of pride.

He mentally pats himself on the back.

Nagini, on the other hand, has regained the ability to do anything other than splutter in indignation. _“You, scarface, are an insufferable little shit sniffer sometimes. I’m telling Tom you said that.”_

 _“You wouldn’t.”_ Harry states confidently, crossing his arms. However, Nagini has a serpentine version of a mocking grin on right now, and right now, Harry knows exactly what that means. _“No. Nononono Nagini please don’t, he already has enough reasons to brutally murder me, please don’t make it worse!”_

She slithers out his window with the same snake grin on her snout, and all Harry can do is drop his face into his hands and groan, because this is somehow his life right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“You know, lately I’ve been wondering what it’ll take for them all to realise he’s back.”_
> 
> *slow clapping* Famous last words, Harry, famous last words. 
> 
> Just keep in mind, in canon Harry is a literal ball of stress and anger at this point in time. Here, Nagini is helping to take the edge off it, as well as find him relatively healthier coping strategies (talking about it, as well as general bitching) So, here, Harry’s a little more chill. Still angsty, stressed and depressed, and an overall angry boi, but more chill.
> 
> And omg I thought this was going to be entirely crack but my brain at 2am was like _go forth and add angst my dude_ and then This happened like woah what


	3. Weaponising your anger issues: A short guide by Harry Potter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry is angry. His holidays are terrible, dementors should all die in a hole somewhere, and the Dursleys can join them for all he cares.

“Get up!” Aunt Petunia hits his door and it rattles on the hinges. Harry groans and buries his head further in his pillow as if covering his ears will somehow stop his Aunt from yelling at him. “Now!” she reiterates when she doesn’t hear movement, voice reaching an even higher pitch. “Vernon has work, and breakfast needs to be made! Up! Now!”

Harry wakes up in the worst mood he’s ever been in for a long time. The sun is too bright in the window, Nagini is off saying hi to the man who murdered his parents, and he’s alone in a house with the human personifications of a hippo, a giraffe and a whale. It takes all he has to not outright snarl at his Aunt as she screeches at him to make breakfast for them. He doesn’t in the end, but it takes an admirable amount of effort on his behalf. 

“Coming,” Harry calls unenthusiastically, pillow muffling his voice.

Her footsteps recede down the hallway and Harry doesn’t move for another five minutes out of sheer spite, something that he has in excess these days. Of course, she comes back with all the grace of an angry freight train less than five minutes later, but by then Harry’s ready. “Boy! Get up already!” The door handle turns.

Putting on a strained voice, he quickly blurts out, “Wait, wait Aunt Petunia! I’m just getting changed right now!” which does the trick. Boom, five more minutes of peace. Aunt Petunia slams shut what sliver of the door she had opened the second before, and leaves once again after a couple more sneered threats.

Hedwig shuffles in her cage behind him.

Harry claws his way out of his sheets, inelegantly dropping onto the floor and padding over to the dresser. Nagini’s nest at it’s base is cold and empty. After changing into clothes three sizes too large for him and feeding Hedwig, he heads downstairs to the kitchen. Uncle Vernon is already seated at the table and reading the newspaper, while Aunt Petunia is reading a book on the couch steaming cup of tea in hand. Harry guesses that Dudley is still asleep upstairs.

She narrows her eyes when she sees him and jabs her bony chin in the direction of the kitchen. 

“Well?” she barks at him, “What are you waiting for? Get to it!” 

Harry sighs with resignation as he begins to make breakfast, and Aunt Petunia goes back to sipping her tea like someone had taken a shit in it.

Dudley was on another diet, as the school nurse at Smeltings was getting insistent that teenage boys should not resemble fleshy beach balls. Despite the careful regulations at Smeltings, somehow Dudley had managed to gain more weight over the school year and maintain his grossly overweight stature despite having a growth spurt of nearly ten centimetres, leaving him towering over Harry and nearly four times as wide.

The nurse was getting serious, and had involved the principal about this matter since all the other measures she had taken had failed. The diet he’d been on for the majority of last year had been completely useless and had just made Dudley a general pain to be around at mealtimes. The hated diet sheet of ‘forbidden foods’ was still pinned on the fridge from the year beforehand, partially hidden behind the grocery list for the week and multiple framed photos of Dudley pinned with colourful magnets. 

He had struggled without fried foods and sweets, and made that very clear in his behaviour by throwing both tantrums and things out the window in addition to spending time over at his friends’ houses. Aunt Petunia was pleased he had so many friends and actively encouraged it. Harry wonders how selectively blind she was not to notice that he came back every time with his stomach full and chins jiggling, but notice when a single spot of mould was left in between the bathroom tiles after Harry had cleaned it.

And, just like the year beforehand, to make him feel better Aunt Petunia had put the entire family on the diet. Harry included. Even though Harry has been basically starving in his bedroom for the past month. Without the food that the Weasleys, Hermione and Sirius had sent him (the only useful thing they’d actually done, his mind traitorously whispers) he probably would have wasted away or something.

But then again, all that had arrived were treats, snacks and candies, so he doubts that Mrs Weasley, or anyone really, actually realised that the Dursleys were starving him.

He aggressively chops up a fruit salad for breakfast using the remaining fruit in the fridge, taking his anger out on apples and stealing the mutilated pieces when he’s sure no one is looking.

Dudley stomps into the kitchen at one point, and Uncle Vernon welcomes him in with an enthusiastic “That’s my boy!” and Aunt Petunia queries if he “Slept well, Diddykins?” He shoots a nasty look at Harry over Aunt Petunia’s shoulder, his equivalent of ‘good morning’, and groans when he sees what Harry’s making.

“Mum,” he whines petulantly, “Are we having fruit for breakfast _again?_ ”

“Oh Diddy,” Petunia simpers. “I know It’s difficult to stomach, but eat it all and we’ll go out and get a treat later.”

“Good plan, Pet,” Uncle Vernon barks from where he’s reading about the stock market on the breakfast table. “You don’t grow into a real man only eating rabbit food. Growing boys need meat.”

 _This,_ Harry thinks a little hysterically, _this is why Dudley is never going to not be on a diet._

Despite all the massive dieting that Dudley has undergone, he’s still just as large as ever. The problem was, Dudley discovered that he had an unforeseen talent in heavyweight boxing and was awarded multiple titles and trophies as a result. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were over the moon and celebrated every match, avidly supporting their son. 

However, this was bad news for Harry. Not only is the reduction in food from the diet getting to him, it also means that Dudley now knows how to punch properly, and how to make it hurt. Of course, Harry isn’t even remotely scared of him or his new skills, not with the constant, reassuring pressure of his wand in his pocket. The only reason he hasn’t been beat up yet is because Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon have managed to instill in him an innate aversion to magic or anything Harry-related, and there’s probably a psychological shadow left from when Aunt Marge got blown up.

Carrying his wand around is a habit he’s recently acquired in the midst of his own paranoia. If Voldemort can find him so easily, what’s to say that Rita Skeeter or a rogue Death Eater can’t do the same?

After quickly plating himself up a decent sized portion, Harry roughly places the bowl of fruit salad on the table and wolfs it down at the kitchen bench before one of them can even think about downsizing his portion. The news anchor drones on in the background, and Harry notices with dismay that the only headlines are strictly muggle things, and nothing that could possibly be thanks to Voldemort rising again. He has no interest in finding out why a middle aged man in London tried to chug hand soap, or why squirrels are suddenly attacking residents of Glasgow, thank you very much.

He’s interrupted by Uncle Vernon. “What are you even looking for in there, boy?” he barks, spooning a large piece of watermelon into his mouth, “You should know that _your_ lot don’t get on _our_ news.”

He doesn’t trust himself to not snap back at his Uncle if he answers right now, anger roiling as it is, so Harry stays silent, focusing on a weirdly shaped grape in his salad. Biting his tongue like this is easier said than done. Much easier.

The newscaster starts droning on about a famous actress’ divorce from her husband in a monotone voice, and Harry pretends like he can’t feel Uncle Vernon’s glare burning a hole on the side of his face. He focuses on the grain of the television screen and bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes the salty metallic tang of blood fill his mouth.

There’s nothing on the news that is even reminiscent of magic, but he watches it regardless. Aunt Petunia interrupts him a mere minute later.

“You’ll do the upstairs bathroom today.” she sneers. “Aside from your usual chores, you’re no longer grounded. I don’t want to see you around the house if you’re going to be lazy.”

“The boy can do something productive if he’s going to stay here.” Uncle Vernon barks out.

“Exactly, dear. Now, on with it, you.” she says, brusquely shooing him out of the kitchen with a dismissive wave of her hands.

Harry scrubs down the shower with the fervor of a prison inmate promised freedom. It’s spic and span by the time he’s finished two hours later, because the black spots in the grout had somehow applied permanent sticking charms to themselves. Eventually, he figures out that simply gouging them out with the tweezers is much more effective than spending another wasted hour with a scrubbing brush. Minor property damage is a necessary sacrifice the Dursleys will just have to suffer through.

He stretches out his back, feeling his shoulder pop as he begins to work out the aches the scrubbing had formed.

And then Aunt Petunia snootily informs him that the grout in between the floor tiles were looking rather disgusting as well, and needed a good clean. Harry was ready to tell her exactly where she could stick the scrubbing brush, but held his tongue, because he was so close to freedom he could taste it.

Any more, and Harry was going to murder someone.

Harry makes it all the way to packing up the cleaning equipment before he gives into the urge to screw something up.

Which, if he’s being entirely honest with himself, is longer than he expected to last.

Putting cubes of chicken stock in the showerhead is a move that is more petty than hurtful, but he needs this. The chicken smell will only get stronger as the person showers for longer, and Aunt Petunia is always blaming Harry for the sky-high water bills even though she knows very well it’s Dudley who rarely has showers shorter than twenty minutes. 

The brash Gryffindor in him is yelling in excitement, but the part that had grown up in Dudley’s shadow is rising to the surface. If Aunt Petunia finds out, the consequences will not be pretty, and he’ll become even more of a pariah in the place that’s supposed to be his home than before.

He shoves that part of him back down, deep into the depths of his personality, right alongside the memories of Little Hangleton and the gnawing fear of the future.

 _Just focus on the now,_ he tells himself, _and now, you need this petty little revenge or you’re going to go insane._

Harry knows he won’t get caught. Dudley is far too stupid to even consider that there would be something inside the showerhead. As far as he knows, Dudley isn’t even aware that the showerhead can be unscrewed. 

Nagini would be proud.

He spends the remainder of the day in the garden, listening to the sound of the newscaster’s voice from under the living room window.

Dinner in the Dursley household is a simple affair, and Harry picks at his food while eyeing the blaring television again. The Dursleys engage in meaningless natter with one another, whether it be about Uncle Vernon’s new chance of promotion, Dudley’s co-curricular activities, or the general gossip in the neighbourhood.

Of course, Harry knows more about the private lives of most people in their neighbourhood than he’d ever wanted to know thanks to Nagini, who was a shameless gossiper on a good day, and a fountain of incriminating blackmail on a bad one.

When you spend a lot of time with a chatterbox who is completely unaware of the concepts of ‘personal boundaries’ or ‘too much information’, you learn a lot of information you would really, _really_ prefer not to know in the first place. 

He hangs around the living room until he gets told to go away. There was nothing on the news, again.

That night, Harry taps the end of his pen against the desk as he tries to recall the character denoting a particular hiss. His studies are going well, and despite the difficulty in differentiating between English and Parseltongue he can kind of do it every now and then. He knows the characters, it’s just matching them with the pitched hisses they correspond with.

Absent-mindedly, he once again glances over to the window where Nagini disappeared from that afternoon. 

He wishes she was back. 

Come to think of it, since he’s only really talked to Nagini in the past month, Harry has been speaking Parseltongue much more than English. 

Ron was going to blow a gasket.

Harry sits on a rickety swing, the only one that Dudley and his gang hasn’t managed to break yet. The chain is cold against his arm where he’s curled around it, and the ground he’s morbidly staring at is slowly darkening as the sun draws further below the horizon. 

Sighing, he runs a hand through his messy hair, wincing when he accidentally tugs on a knot.

His first free day without chores, and he’d spent it behind the magnolia bush under the living room window, hoping to overhear something on the muggle news that could possibly mean unrest in the Magical world. He'd rather spend it reclining on the couch alongside Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, but all that had invited was sneers and pointed questions. Admittedly, the hot, hard earth of the flower garden was not the most comfortable place to lie on earth, but at least he’d had peace and quiet there.

Harry would be lying if he said that he didn’t have a small amount of hope that Nagini would come back early and find him there, but disappointment is something he’s well acquainted with these days.

And now, he was here, just past sundown in an empty playground, dwelling in his own mind.

If he was being entirely honest, it was strange to be idle just like this. His life so far has been lived between a state of pushing and pulling - the push of what he’s supposed to be and what he’s supposed to do, and the pull of his own will and of what feels right in his heart.

Being alone now - in a society that couldn’t care less about him and with no expectations or responsibilities on his shoulders - Harry feels like he’s been cut loose, in a way. There’s a strange disconnect between the responsibilities and image of the Boy-Who-Lived, the delinquent who goes to St. Brutus’ Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys, and who he is now.

He’s just Harry, and there is a swing and the darkening sky and nothing to do.

Maybe this is what freedom should feel like.

Just as he’s getting lost in his own memories, he stops. A flicker of movement in the corner of his eye makes him look up by the entrance of the locked park. There are several dark figures underneath the old street light, illuminating their figures from behind and it’s easy to place who’s passing the derelict playground where he’s sitting.

Dudley and his little posse of friends seem lackluster in the aftermath of the Triwizard Tournament. Not as numerous, not as intimidating, not as strong. Just a gang of teenage delinquents trying to affirm their superiority complexes on the neighbourhood kids.

It’s a shame he has little to no conscious control over his magic wandlessly. If he did, he knows without a doubt that Dudley would have spent the majority of his childhood without eyebrows.

For a moment, Harry hopes that they see him, come over and try to intimidate him. Let them try. Dudley knows that Harry is not easy to intimidate, but his friends will insist. Dudley doesn’t dare touch Harry, and they both know that. It would be great fun to taunt him and watch as his friends silently judged him for being unable to respond.

Harry can feel his wand heating up in his pocket in response to his own desires. 

Let Dudley taste a fraction of the pain he’s inflicted over the years.

The lone street light flickers. 

He scuffs his foot on the ground below the swing, creating another divot in the shape of his foot in the earth below. 

Sighing, he stands and brushes off his faded jeans, heading over to where Dudley is saying goodbye to his little gang. Uncle Vernon had decided a long time ago that whatever time Dudley came home was the ‘perfect time’ to do so and any time after that was much too late.

Once they’re gone, Harry jogs a little to catch up to Dudley as he begins to walk home.

“Dudley,” Harry says in a neutral tone, hiding the urge to provoke and hurt under a layer of false cordiality. 

Dudley snorts and ignores him, continuing to walk. Neither of them are fooled for a second with Harry’s casual address. They’ve had years of experience to get to know the distinct kinds of hostility in each other gazes.

Nonplussed at Dudley’s dismissal, Harry follows him. Now that he’s closer, Dudley smells like a disgusting mix of chicken noodle soup and sweaty teenager. He barely manages to hold back his grin, only allowing the corners of his mouth to twitch up in the way he knows Dudley hates. His prank worked, and beautifully too.

“Which ten year-old did you beat up tonight, Big D?” he leans forward, gaze provoking, “What’d he do?” 

“He cheeked me. Deserved it.” Dudley says shortly, dismissively.

“Dudley,” Harry sighs in mock disappointment, shaking his head, making an effort to keep in step with his cousin. “Just because someone calls you the love child of a beluga whale and a naked mole rat doesn’t mean you can knock the lights out of them. It’s not an insult, just a logical deduction.”

Harry sees Dudley clench his fist in the corner of his eye and grins. He already felt less angry. Taking out his anger on Dudley never got old, and never failed to make him feel better. 

“At least I hang out with _humans._ ” Dudley sneers at Harry, knowing his height and weight puts him at an advantage. “Go and play with those snakes of yours. You’ve spent so much time with those freaky reptiles you can’t even speak English properly.”

Harry fixes him with a narrow-eyed glare, dropping the grin he’d donned earlier. “What do you mean?” he says. His voice sounds louder in the empty street. The road they’re walking down is narrow, boxed in by the high wall hiding in suburban properties on one side, and rows of garage doors on the other. 

“You sound more creepy when you speak. Smoother. Hiss your esses a little.” Dudley says, taking in Harry’s sudden confusion. 

Harry rubs his scar with one hand. He hadn’t noticed at all. Part of Harry is worried - does this mean that Voldemort is bleeding through his connection more strongly now that he’s been revived? But, another tiny part of him is unmistakably a little happy that his connection to Nagini is being shown in other ways. Even if the humans won’t accept him, there’s still a snake who will.

He experiments with his own voice as he replies, listening in for the changes that Dudley claims are displayed so strongly.

“Never been normal anyway, Dudders,” Harry relishes the noticeable slight hiss in his voice as he rolls the name over his tongue. Dudley pales at the sound. “Not here, not there. Your Mummy and Daddy have seen to that.”

“And they were right to, freak.” Dudley retorts in a sharp tone, already short temper fraying even further at the mention of his parents.

Harry’s hand moves to where his wand is concealed in his pants subconsciously. Harry is overcome with the urge to hex him silly, to send him home to his hateful parents with a pig snout instead of a nose, growing antlers and only able to talk in barks.

A street light flickers as they pass under it. 

It feels like the temperature has dropped twenty degrees. Dudley continues in a voice full of spite, oblivious to the change in atmosphere, his pudgy face scrunched up in a mix of anger and hate.

“Mum and Dad will never love you, you creep.” he sneers, and then pauses, because even Dudley’s pea-sized brain has enough emotional intelligence to know that he’s just crossed a line.

Harry laughs, a single outburst, before he can stifle it. Something sharp and cruel rises in his chest aside from the familiar bottled anger, sick and tired of Dudley’s needless, spiteful cruelty.

“Oh, I know that already,” Harry bares his teeth in a facsimile of a smile, “But then again, I wasn’t the one who got beaten up by the girls volleyball team for being a creep, was I, dear Diddykins?”

The temperature drops further. The stars go out and Harry realises why the world is silent around them. The sound of his own breaths is echoing in his ears

“You little-” Dudley snarls, but Harry isn’t paying him any attention.

His wand is out in a split-second, held out in front of him as he scans the surroundings.

“Hey, put that thing away! Just you wait until I tell Mum and Dad, you-”

The street light flickers weakly, before giving out entirely, plunging them into a heavy, suffocating darkness. His limbs feel awkward and ungainly, like the energy has been sucked out of them, alongside his happiness and the vestiges of the safely guarded hope that sustained him through the long weeks trapped in Privet Drive.

_Dementors._

He can hear them coming now, deep scraping, gasping, rattling breaths in lungs too large and too small at the same time. He doesn’t need to be able to see to know that they’re closing in on his position.

He runs because the only other option is dying. 

He pulls Dudley along with him with every ounce of strength he has left, ignoring his terrified cousin’s shouting and the flashes of green across his own vision. Phantom screaming in his ears, Harry stumbles at an inopportune moment, and he feels Dudley roughly push past him, running as fast as his pudgy legs can carry him. 

His senses blur then sharpen, hyperfocused on the irregular staccato of his own heartbeat; he feels the gravel cutting open his palms and the blood pounding in his head, Dudley’s footsteps fading into the distance.

Dudley is gone. 

Amidst the scarce glow of the weakly flickering street light, Harry sees the dementor bend over him, pale, skeletal hands outstretched. It’s cold. He feels ice creep from the ground into the fresh cuts on his palms. 

He flips himself onto his back, and crawls back, away from the approaching nightmare. His wand moves, mouth forming the syllables a familiar spell, but it lacks the warmth he knows he needs to cast it correctly. The silver mist he produces only provides a second’s reprieve.

His back hits a wall, and the dementor moves in.

He’s too young to die, too young to have so many people hating him for no other reason than his identity. He won’t even get to see Ron and Hermione one last time. Voldemort’s finally gone and done it, he thinks, gasping through the terror permeating the air itself, he’s done it now. 

The dementor reaches for him with spimy skeletal hands, and the screaming in his head reaches a crescendo. 

_But,_ a corner of his mind screams, _this makes no sense at all._

Harry raises his wand again in a shaking hand, producing a small cloud of silver glitter instead of the Patronus he needs.

And then he thinks, _Nagini wouldn’t have done this._ And again, with more faith.

_Nagini didn’t do this._

A massive ethereal stag of molten silver and moonlight erupts from the tip of his wand.

It catches the dementor on its horns, sending it spinning away into the darkness before rounding back to take out a second one approaching Harry, and suddenly he can breath again. The alleyway erupts into life and light, a warm breeze tousling his hair, stars and moon visible above him as the darkness melts away. 

The stag canters the length of the street, before dissolving into fine silver mist that disperses into the night air.

Harry clutches his wand in hand, and fully slumps against the wall, gasping for breath. It’s over. 

Gradually, he pulls himself up to stand on shaking legs, and begins to move in the direction of Privet Drive. The wards are safe, he reasons, and should work against dementors if they work against Death Eaters. Or at least he hopes so.

And then Mrs Figg is on him - who knew who he was the entire time but left him to suffer with the Dursleys - chattering like she’s possessed. Her frizzy grey hair is falling out of her hairnet and pointing in random directions and she looks unkempt and animated, completely different to her usual batty old persona. Harry stays quiet and listens to her rapid-fire talking. He’s probably in shock. 

Harry didn’t even need to prompt her in order to get a good amount of answers. Mrs Figg knows everything, and still sat aside and did nothing when the Dursleys were doing their best to make his life hell. He’s broken the Statute of Secrecy, and there’s something called the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery. Dumbledore has set up a watch on him, without telling him, and apparently not all of them are savoury characters. This Mundungus Fletcher, for instance. Harry almost died because that sack of hippogriff dung skipped out to go and buy stolen cauldrons while on duty.

And if he got attacked by dementors the moment Mundungus left, it means that there's a third party watching him. Which isn't Voldemort. He'd guessed that already during the attack. Nagini had been very open about spying on him and what she's been asked to do, as well as her own derision towards that sort of 'sneaky shit'. Of course, there is the option that she left because she knew about the attack and left as a result, but he doubts she would have befriended him so thoroughly (even teaching him how to write in Parselscript and making a nest in his wardrobe) if she knew that was going to happen.

Looking back, it's evident that she's just as attached to him as he is to her.

He's yanked out of his own thoughts by Mrs Figg's stressed voice. “I’m going straight home now.” she says. “Need to wait for more instructions. Stay in the house. Goodnight.”

“Hang on a moment! But what about-”

And then Mrs Figg's gone as soon as she’s speedwalked him to his front doorstep, her slippers slapping on the ground as she hurries away into the darkness, and Harry has a thousand more questions on the tip of his tongue but no time to ask.

He stands there dumbly. 

Who else wants him dead, if it's not Voldemort?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm completely blown away with the amount of support and positivity people have shown towards this fic. Thank you so much! 
> 
> Also, don’t worry, Nagini’ll be back next chapter! ;D
> 
> And there was plot  
>  _Oh my god there was plot_


	4. How to be a principled human scum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nagini is a terrible influence, to the surprise of absolutely no one. She also can give some pretty damn good advice, but that's only if you have no morals. Harry gets lessons in the art of swearing, and the Order gets the shock of a lifetime.

Sitting in his room alone, once again, the orange glow of the streetlight outside his window seems to have become three shades darker than usual.

Harry feels his stomach growl hungrily and wonders again, with growing apathy, where the fairness and honour was. Although he had grown up without experiencing such things, Hogwarts had instilled their importance in him enough times for him to understand that having attributes like those were desirable for boy saviours. 

He has been embraced by better people with better qualities, but now, staring at the ceiling of the roof of his bedroom, he wonders if they were lying all along, or wearing the masks worn by those who had learnt better than to wholeheartedly trust others. He looks at the door that is shut and locked with a deadbolt from the outside, the battered furniture surrounding him, the cat flap in the door and the lukewarm bowl of watery soup pushed carelessly past it, and can’t help but think that despite all his faults, he deserves better than this.

He fingers the holly wand in his pocket with sick bewilderment rising in his stomach. 

There’s a third party trying to kill him, his allies and friends refuse to tell him anything about a war with him as the figurehead, and the only one who actually appears to care at all is the self-proclaimed best friend and caretaker of the man who made him an orphan.

Nothing makes sense anymore.

The letters in his hand, creased in his white-knuckled grip, are the off-white of ancient teeth. The ink on two of them - Sirius’ and Mr Weasley’s - is still fresh and hastily written, partially smudged in parts but legible overall. The other two are pristine, carefully folded into pristine stamped parchment envelopes and signed with a flourish by Mafalda Hopkirk of the Improper Use of Magic Office.

He drops them carelessly onto his bedside table before collapsing face-down on his bed, screwing his eyes shut and running his hands through perpetually messy black hair. 

The wire frames of his glasses dig into his cheeks but he ignores the sting of pain in favour of burrowing into his pillow.

Hedwig will be back soon, with news. He hopes.

Harry dreams of endless twisting graveyards dotted with intricate gravestones and cloaked figures drawing in rattling, dry, choking breaths. There’s a shadowy figure in the corner of his eye that won’t leave him alone no matter how far or how fast he runs. 

He flees, and it follows.

The flicker of darkness rouses him before Aunt Petunia can, an interruption in the beam of sunlight falling across his face slowly dragging him from unconsciousness. Groggily blinking in the light, he peers with a squinted eye toward the window, subconsciously clenching and unclenching his fist in the sheets as he slowly becomes more aware of his surroundings.

The curtains sway in the morning breeze. 

He had long since taken to leaving the window open at night, because Nagini liked the freedom to come and go whenever she felt like it.

Head foggy, Harry blinks blearily at the window again before nuzzling back into his pillow, fully intent on catching as much shut-eye as he can before the Dursleys begin their purposeful racket downstairs once they wake.

He feels a weight sliding up his calf, and sleepily tries to kick it off with an annoyed hiss rising in his throat, disliking the disruption. His vision is so blurry it looks like a dark blob, and he’s too tired from the drama of the night before and the terrors that visited him in his sleep to even register that it could be really anything other than merely a blob.

The blob hisses back in response to his own, and throws itself dramatically on top of him, effectively glomping him. Harry groans in protest at the sudden weight on top of him.

 _“Mornin’, scarface,”_ the blob says, _“you look like someone’s used your wand as a disposable nose-picker. Who’s gone and done what now?”_

Harry opens his eyes fully this time, and blinks once, twice. The blob becomes a slightly less blurry blob. He’s suddenly a lot more awake than he was three seconds ago. _“Everything’s gone crazy, honestly.”_ he murmurs, yawning, _“How was your trip?”_

 _“You’ve improved at changing the subject discreetly.”_ Nagini nods sagely, pulling more of her body around him in what is probably a snake rendition of a hug. _“That bad, eh?”_

Her tail is now stroking his left ankle, and coiled around Harry’s left knee, a part of her crossing his knees and another resting on his stomach. A large section of her body is nestled into his side, and some more hangs off the side of the mattress and onto the floor, due to a probable lack of space on his bed. She’s somehow under and over his arm at the same time, and she rests her head beside his face, the remainder of her body supporting both his neck and embracing his head at the same time. 

She’s everywhere, and Harry feels strangely safe.

 _“You didn’t answer my question either.”_ Harry sighs, wrapping his arms around thick coils of happy snake once he’s put on his glasses. The world around him gains razor-sharp clarity and defined edges of colour, near overwhelming at first when contrasted against the blurry mess he sees without them. He moves to more completely rest his head on her, slowly blinking the sleep out of his eyes. _“Doesn’t that mean you’re better at avoiding the subject than I am?”_

Nagini does that little familiar snort of hers, and Harry grins at her vexation. Inside though, it’s a different story. If his hands weren’t firmly wrapped around her midsection, he’s sure they would be shaking. He’s irrationally nervous, of course, that she’s betrayed him to Voldemort, that they’ll use the knowledge of the Dursleys and his childhood against him. 

_“Right you are, scarface.”_ Nagini continues, oblivious to his worries. _“Usually I would gloat at being better than you at something, however right now I need to rant, so I’ll be snooty about it later.”_

 _She wouldn’t have,_ he thinks to himself, a little more hopeful than it should be, _I know better than to doubt her like this._

Regardless of his internal turmoil, Harry pushes his rising emotions down and keeps them there, simmering in the base of his stomach in an ever-present blob of anger, fear and doubt, and presses his face into her scales where Nagini’s wrapped around him rather than facing them.

He vaguely remembers Hermione telling him last year that, “repressing your emotions is unhealthy, Harry! You need to learn to deal with them up front or you’ll end up hurting yourself!”

Well, Harry guesses it might be different for her because she didn’t grow up in a cupboard. 

He’ll do what he always does, and he’s survived more or less intact so far.

 _“How was it?”_ Harry asks, beginning to run a singlet finger down her nose in a patting motion with his free arm. _“Pettigrew still alive? Voldemort still a hideous snake-monster?”_

_“Yes and yes, unfortunately. Tom honestly needs to get his old face back or put a fancy-ass face mask on because this one is making me want to throw him out a window, and then myself after him. After eating Pettigrew, of course. Sometimes, I cannot deal with that piece of spineless rat shit animagus, I swear to whatever deity is up there.”_

This brings a small smile to his face because this, he knows at least, has not changed one bit. She continues with a huff, ranting on about how many times his mother must have dropped him as a baby, about how it was perfectly probable that his other form could have been a maked mole rat, but instead he got lucky in the animagus lottery and got stuck as a normal rat instead.

 _“If only he wasn’t so bloody useful, ‘cause he’s a literal rat. Every time I see him, he acts like I’m going to eat him! Even when he’s in human form!”_ At this, Nagini pauses, head tilting to the side in deep thought. Harry takes advantage of her hesitation to raise a hand and scratch her chin, applying pressure where he knows she likes it, and watches on with a ball of happiness in his stomach when she relaxes into it with a sigh of happy contentment.

 _“Hang on,”_ she says, after a second, _“maybe he should be scared then.”_

Harry pointedly tries not to think about what that implies. 

_“And oi, brat. You don’t have to probe me for answers like those other dickheads who won’t tell you anything. Just fuckin’ outright ask and I’ll answer honestly.”_

Harry gives her a pointed look that’s a mix between gratefulness and exasperation and cuts to the chase, his curiosity and anxiety getting the better of him.

 _“What have you told him about me?”_ he asks, shifting onto his side so he can see her better. For all the faith he has placed in her, Harry is not a saint, and he knows from experience that when it comes to choosing between what is right and what is easy, sometimes nothing is right and nothing is easy. He truly is unsure of where her true loyalties are placed, and if she considers their budding friendship worth lying to the man who has been her sole companion for years, and more than capable of ruining his entire life, on an even greater scale than what he has done so far.

Harry’s always been good at recognising liars, for as long as he can remember. Dudley blaming things on him, His Aunt and Uncle telling stories about his escapades at St. Brutus’, the school counsellor with her plastic smile saying _I’m sure your uncle and aunt care love you and Dudley equally_ , and many more. Ron denying the jealousy he feels eating away at him from the inside out, Dumbledore’s penchant for keeping important secrets to himself even at the best of times, and every person who has ever claimed that they want to get to know Harry for reasons other than his identity as the Boy-Who-Lived.

He sees them.

Likewise, it’s quite ironic how the only people who have ever really been truthful are the ones who hated him the most. Snape, for all his misplaced rage, was brutally honest in the worst of ways. He never put up a shield and tried to be anything other than a crabby, depressed old dungeon bat who hated teaching nearly as much as he hated shampoo. Harry guessed that would probably be the only thing he would ever acknowledge about Snape.

The other - now that he thinks about it - was Voldemort himself. He'd never made a secret of the fact that when he came back, Harry was the first one he was going after. For all the bad blood between them, Harry has learned more from his villainous monologues in the Chamber of Secrets and in the graveyard of Little Hangleton than he had from all of his meetings with Dumbledore, combined. Anything else he has learnt has been as a direct result of Voldemort’s actions.

And now, he hopes that brutal honesty will extend onto Nagini, not out of hate or misplaced resentment, but of a bond of companionship that they’d forged through long hours of talking, joking and shared misery in their circumstances.

 _“Not much.”_ she hisses nonchalantly. The morning sun reflects off her scales, dying them a lighter green. _“Mainly that your hair is perpetually fluffy and unbelievably soft, and your relatives are pieces of shit and I want to bite them. I don’t think he took it seriously though, I hate literally everybody I meet.”_

_“He would have pressed for more information than that.”_

_“And he did.”_ Nagini sniggers at the thought, and the tip of her tail stops stroking his calf as she lifts her head so she can meet him eye to eye. _“So, I told him all about the dirtiest secrets and most scandalous gossip of every single person on Privet Drive and within ten minutes he was close to tying my mouth shut.”_

 _“And nothing else?”_ Harry probes, and he knows she can also hear the thinly veiled doubt seeping into his tone.

_“Scarface, you underestimate my ability to steer conversations into completely random directions. At the start of the conversation he could ask me about your nightmares, but within two minutes I would be ranting about mice distribution throughout Magnolia Crescent and the impact on local cats on-.”_

_“-Yes,”_ Harry interrupts her briskly, _“But what did you actually tell him?”_

_“That I want a muggle machine gun for Christmas.”_

_“I mean actual incriminating stuff here, Nagini, I think you’re forgetting that the guy you’re giving information to wants to hurt me with it.”_

_“Tom’s scary smart, scarface, and I can’t lie to him. I was as vague and distracting as possible, but he’s probably guessed from what I haven’t said that you don’t have a perfect home life like most think.”_

_“You shouldn’t have said anything.”_

_“I didn’t really. He knows me well enough to guess what I’m not saying.”_

_“You should stick your snout somewhere other than my living situation.”_ Harry retorts.

_“I can’t give a rat’s arse about boundaries in this situation, brat.”_ Nagini hisses back angrily. _“What remains of my moral compass won’t allow it. They’re fucking abusive, scarface, no other way to look at it.”_

_“You shouldn’t have told him. And they’re not,”_ Harry snaps back. _“They just don’t like me because I-”_ he pauses.

He tears his gaze away from her, staring down at the crumpled sheets beneath them. _“It’s not like I made it easy for them to. Like me, that is. They already had everything they wanted in Dudley, and I…”_

Harry frowns. It hurt to admit it verbally. _“It’s not like I love them. It only makes sense that they don’t like me either.”_

Nagini stares back at him with something like pity in her serpentine eyes.

 _“I, I…”_ Harry stutters. He doesn’t know what to say. 

_“I know.”_

She slowly moves around him, and wraps him even more firmly in her heavy coils, in something like a serpentine version of a hug. Nagini is cold-blooded, but her affection warms him more than her scales ever could. 

_“You asked the Hat to be in Gryffindor, didn’t you?”_ she says slowly, fixing him a questioning gaze from a single eye. He meets it with a challenge in his own, daring her to tell anyone, before breaking eye contact. _“You’re cunning beneath your utter lack of self-preservation, and snakes rarely grow up in happy households.”_

The curtains wave in the light breeze. Dust mites swirl and dance, illuminated by the light through the window. He hears the beginnings of noise downstairs. 

_“It’s true, ain’t it? Scarface.”_ He ignores her, preferring to press his face further into her coils, making his glasses even more lopsided than they already are.

 _“Harry.”_ She tries again.

She noses his hair, tongue flickering in and out.

_“I won’t leave you here alone.”_

Harry pushes down the unexpected warmth growing in his chest at that statement, and tries to ignore the growing realisation that a part of him really did love the best friend of the man who had murdered his parents and ruined his entire life.

 _“Thanks, Nagini.”_ he whispers, trying to hide the quaver threatening to surface in his voice. 

Nagini doesn’t mention the damp patches he’s causing on her scales, instead leaning down to gently nose his along his cheek, sliding against his jaw in a display of gentle affection before slowly curling around his neck and resting her head in the crook of his neck and shoulder. Her touch is soft and strangely delicate for a creature of her size, and Harry revels in the fact that such softness is being directed at him.

And at that moment, Harry knew he would stay pliant in her coils, no matter her intentions or possible allegiance, if only to continue being held like that, like he was something so precious.

If this is what having a family is like, then, he thinks he hates Voldemort that little bit more for taking this warmth away from him. 

_“Nagini,”_ he whispers again once he can trust his own voice again, half-muffled from where his face is pressed against her side and on the cusp of breaking, _“What can I do?”_

She noses his messy curls with a warmth reminiscent of Mrs Weasley, and neither of them speak for a heavy moment, thinking in silence. And when she speaks again, her consonants elongated into the slurring accent he now recognises as Parseltongue, he has an inkling that she understands he’s speaking of something greater than the Dursleys.

_“Grasp what you have with your own two hands and take control of it, scarface. Let everyone else come at you with silver tongues and hidden agendas and murder in their eyes, and if you must go down, go down with your wand blazing. Yes.”_

Harry buries his head further in her moving coils, and imagines the reason that she’s shifting is so that she can hold him better.

 _“What happened when I was gone, to shake you so much?”_ she asks him quietly, resting her head in his nest of his fluffy hair in an attempt to provide some modicum of comfort.

 _“Dementors attacked me and Dudley.”_ Nagini hisses in shock and outrage above him. Harry doesn’t move, enjoying the feeling of her scales sliding against his cheek. _“I cast the Patronus Charm and now I might be expelled from Hogwarts.”_ Harry says shortly, haltingly. He’s still in partial disbelief that it happened to him. He might still be in shock. _“I know it’s not Voldemort. Or you.”_

_“So another dipshit wants to kill you.”_

Harry hums an affirmation.

_“Dumbledore probably knows about the Dursleys. He has some people called the Order of the Phoenix watching the house.”_

She cocks her head at him. _“You had stalkers?”_

_“Pretty much.”_

_“And they know how the Dursleys treat you?”_ Nagini’s voice is softer and far more dangerous now.

 _“I think so.”_ is what he says. _They’d be blind not to,_ is what he doesn’t say. 

Aunt Petunia bangs the door with a clenched fist and clear annoyance, making sure he’s awake, and Harry resigns himself to another day in his room. 

_“You tried to save him, didn’t you?”_ Nagini says eventually, later that night , and Harry can’t help the short burst of sad laughter that escapes him against her scales, full of self-mocking and betrayed hope, before nodding into her side. 

_“But he left you.”_

Shifting uncomfortably, Harry is reminded once again why he hates how perceptive she can be at times like these. 

_“You should’ve just fucking ditched him, honestly. Left him in that alley. What were you expecting to happen?”_

_“I don’t know.”_

_“I know. The fatass wouldn’t have been hurt, now that I think about it. His IQ probably would have increased as a vegetable.”_

Harry coughs into his elbow, trying to muffle his laughter. There have been other times like this, when Harry has been stuck in his own head alongside his nightmares and Nagini has done a similar thing. 

_“And look at him, the great lump.”_ Nagini continues hissing with casual disdain infusing her tone, _“Getting his soul nearly sucked out would probably be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him.”_

He spares a grin at her, before lapsing into solemn silence again.

Harry finds himself teetering on the edge between blistering rage and insurmountable apathy most days. 

Nagini doesn’t hunt, instead opting to stay with him during his isolation. He’s gotten a lot better at Parselscript over the past month, and now can write full texts and sentences, but has a bad habit of scrambling up his punctuation. Nagini thinks his handwriting barely legible, but she still makes an effort to translate and mark his scribbles which, she grudgingly admits, is slowly improving.

Together, he and Nagini pour over the letters he was sent, from both the order and the Ministry of magic, and she takes the time to catch him up to date on Wizarding politics, various departments and policies and general knowledge about the Wizarding World that everybody simply assumed he knew, because he was Harry Potter.

She tells him about Wizarding folk tales, legends and history. The war with Grindelwald is recounted in explicit detail and Harry can’t help but feel that she was personally affected in some way she isn’t telling him. But that’s okay. They both had secrets.

And then, she begins to tell him of the events leading to Voldemort’s rising, including his descent into insanity and how close he came to creating what he thought was a better world. It’s interesting to hear it from a more neutral viewpoint, one that isn’t full of biased propaganda for either side. Apparently, before he spiralled, Voldemort was planning on unifying magical society, and creating a safe haven for Wizardkind in which they didn’t have to hide, far away from muggles. In the end, he needed support by the Purebloods, and so took up a false blood supremacy front which eventually became reality as his own sense diminished. In the last years before his vanquishing, he stopped being the charismatic and charming ‘Tom Riddle’ at all, and fully sank into the twisted persona of ‘Lord Voldemort’.

She tells him of how, towards the end, he didn’t even recognise her.

She tells him of the Order of the Phoenix and their attempts to stop his takeover, and what happened thereafter. Harry cries and hisses at her when she tells him about how Voldemort went after his and Neville’s parents, but she stands her ground. As much as he hates it, he appreciates her abject honesty in what she’s told him.

Even when Nagini admits she is keeping things from him, he understands. She’s keeping his secrets from Voldemort, just how she’s keeping Voldemort’s secrets from him. The perfect middleman.

By that point, it was pointless to deny it. She had barged into his life with the elegance of a freight train, and breached the walls of his heart in the similar inelegant manner. 

_“Dude.”_ Nagini says empathetically. _“That’s a big improvement from last time. Do it again!”_

Harry nods, wracking his brains. He takes a deep breath and lets it out. _“Death Eaters are a bunch of self-assured egotistical wankers without spines.”_

_“Much better. But calling them ‘spineless wankers’ is still more powerful than saying ‘wankers without spines’. It’s all in the wordplay. You still have a long way to go yet, my young padawan.”_

Let it be said that Harry deeply regrets introducing her to Star Wars. But he will (probably) never regret asking Nagini to teach him how to swear. According to her, the ability to verbally tear someone a new asshole is a greatly underrated skill, one which she claims she has perfected after years of experimentation and foulmouthed cussing at a multitude of different dickheads.

 _“Okay, but what if it was only a statement for dramatic effect?”_ he asks, curious.

_“Then it would be ‘fucking spineless cowards.’ Three words is the charm, scarface, more words take away the rhythm and elegance of the statement.”_

_“Can swearing even sound elegant?”_

_“Excuse me, is my swearing not the most fucking majestic thing you’ve ever heard in your life?”_

Harry disguises his laugh as a cough into his fist. _“Of course not, your swearing is a work of art, Nagini, without a doubt.”_

 _“Obviously.”_ she preens, and Harry can’t help but burst into a fit of laughter.

The door clicks open on the fourth night since Hedwig had left, and Harry stares impassively as Uncle Vernon’s bulk pushes through the doorway from his position on his bed. 

“We’re going out.”

Harry responds with a look of cool disinterest. He knows from experience the ‘we’ doesn’t include him.

“I mean - your aunt, Dudley and I - are going out. You are not.”

“Sure.” Harry deigns this a suitable response, and adjusts his position against the wall. The mattress creaks beneath him in protest. He goes back to counting the patterns on the ceiling. 

“You are not to leave your room.”

Harry tilts his head in his uncle’s direction. “Okay.” he says.

“You are not allowed to use the television, stereo, or any of our other possessions.”

“Right.”

“I am locking your door.” 

“Go ahead.” Harry coldly smiles at him. Like that would keep him out anyway. He’d figured out how to remove the pins of his door hinges the summer after he first was moved to Dudley’s second bedroom. Unfortunately, doing it was simply time consuming and difficult to fix, so he could only do it when he had hours and hours of time to himself without the Dursleys, which rarely happened.

Uncle Vernon gives him a suspicious look before stomping out, slamming the door behind him. The lock clicks shut and his footsteps retreat down the hall. 

Nagini comes out from under his bed. _“Dickhead.”_ she sneers in the direction of the door, flicking the tip of her tail. She joins him against the wall, piling her coils over his crossed legs. He absentmindedly strokes her head.

They sit in a comfortable silence, broken only by the unmistakable sound of the car exiting the driveway. Harry drifts off to sleep where he sits, head pillowed on Nagini where she rests on his shoulders.

Some time later, Harry wakes with Nagini butting his neck. Something prods his side when he moves, slowly gaining consciousness. Her scales are smooth and cool against his skin and he leans into the contact. 

_“Feels nice.”_ he murmurs, half asleep. 

_“Fuck ‘nice’! Look outside, scarface!”_ Nagini whacks him with her tail more aggressively this time.

He looks outside. The sky had grown steadily darker, and heavy cloud cover threatened incoming rain. Outside was quiet and still, the streetlights emitting the pale orange glow he was familiar with. 

_“What?”_ Harry says dumbly, a little confused at what she’s trying to get at. A clatter sounds downstairs, followed by hushed voices, and they both freeze.

 _“Burglars?”_ he hisses to the snake under his breath, thankful that Parseltongue is much easier to speak quietly than English.

 _“Not sure,”_ she hisses back, _“be on your guard.”_

He nods, before gathering her in his arms and shifting to his feet. Nagini silently slides out of his grip and to the ground, reared up and smelling the air, tongue flickering in and out. Harry takes out his wand from under the loose floorboard - empty apart from his Invisibility Cloak, photo book and the Marauder’s Map - and presses up against his bedroom door, listening with all his might. Next moment, Harry startles as the door clicks open. Huh. Accidental magic at his age was unexpected, but greatly appreciated in this situation. He stares at it, and then at Nagini, who looks rather dumbfounded for a moment, and then smug. 

_“I fucking knew you had it in you,”_ she hisses proudly. Harry has a feeling that if she had hands, she would be giving him a thumbs-up right about now.

Together, they slowly move out onto the landing, straining their ears for sounds. None come. Harry’s wand is out in front of him, a comforting weight in his palm, and with a nod to Nagini, they move quickly and silently to the head of the stairs.

Harry’s heart moves to his throat. Eight or nine dark figures stand at the base of the staircase, silhouetted in the dark hall, now looking at him.

“Wand down boy, before you take someone’s eye out,” a low, voice growls. Harry stops, wand still raised.

“Professor Moody?” he asks uncertainly. Suddenly Harry feels more self conscious about the way he hisses his esses.

“Didn’t do much teaching, in the end.” Moody says in a rough voice, “Get down here, and move very slowly while you're at it.”

Harry doesn’t move, keeping his wand raised. He had every right to be careful, after all. He’d thought he had known this man, but it had turned out to be an imposter, one who had tried to kill Harry and no one had known any better until it was too late and everything was too screwed up to fix.

"Harry, what-?" A familiar voice starts.

“Just do it, boy.” Moody interrupts, cutting the voice off. 

Harry relaxes minutely. “Professor Lupin? Is that you?” he calls disbelievingly.

“Move, Potter! Slowly!” Moody barks out again, and Harry raises his hands in annoyed resignation at his insistence. 

The realisation of what Moody is trying to do hits him suddenly. Ah. That makes more sense. Only he can see Nagini with his magical eye in the darkness, and is probably worried that she’s hostile to Harry. 

“Is everything alright, Mad-Eye?” another voice asks, a woman’s.

“Now, don’t panic,” Moody growls out, “but there’s a giant bloody snake reared up behind Potter.” 

With that in mind, Harry decides the best course of action. He crouches down and picks up Nagini (or as much of her as he can carry) in both arms. Harry can feel the stare of his magical eye resting on him, like a tangible weight.

"Potter-" Moody starts growling, but Harry cuts him off.

"It's fine, Professor, um, I mean, uh, Mad-Eye? She's a friend."

Nagini hisses in understanding at what he’s trying to do and begins winding her way around his torso, eventually plonking her head on top of his own when she deems herself comfortable enough.

“Give me a sec,” he calls, and regrets that he couldn't make out Moody’s expression in the darkness when she had begun to coil herself around him.

 _“I cannot_ wait _to see them collectively lose their shit when they get an eyeful of this.”_ Nagini quietly says. The vindictive part of Harry secretly agrees. 

Nagini settles, but unfortunately for Harry, she’s huge, really quite heavy and he’s not that strong after a month of little to no exercise in Durzkaban. It's difficult to keep her in position comfortably, but they both do their best.

He hears several rapid intakes of breath when the woman he heard earlier casts a Lumos, and the motley crew at the base of the stairs become visible, shock apparent on their faces, morphing one by one into horror.

Harry’s pretty sure one of the wizards looks close to fainting, and a couple of others look pale.

“Harry!” Lupin chokes, the worry lines on his face accentuated by the light flaring from the violet-haired woman’s wand tip, “What- What are you doing?”

“Um,” Harry says, “I’m holding my friend, who just so happens to be a giant snake, if that’s what you mean?”

The pink haired woman seems to have partially gotten over her shock, “But it’s dangerous, Harry, and with You-Know-Who back-”

“She is quite friendly, thank you very much. And on the same note, Voldemort has not befriended every single snake in Britain.” _Except this one,_ Harry adds mentally.

“Tonks,” she says, “call me Tonks. And I’m sorry, but the snake’s kinda creepy.”

Moody has raised his wand in their direction, and Harry forces himself to stay still. He senses Nagini’s agitation at being held at wandpoint, defenceless.

“How do you even know it’s him, Lupin?” Moody says gruffly. His magic eye spins in rapid circles, and Harry wonders if it ever makes him dizzy. “Does anyone have Veritaserum on them?”

“My patronus is a stag,” Harry interjects nervously.

“That’s him, Mad-Eye,” says Lupin, running a hand through his hair and rumpling it further.

With that Harry makes his way down the stairs, pointedly ignoring the eyes on him, to join the group. Only Lupin does not take a step backwards, but he does look rather pale. It’s at that moment he realises that Nagini is probably being an asshole again. He pokes her side and hisses, _“Oi, stop it,”_ ignoring the surrounding flinches that follow. 

Nagini makes a snotty _‘hmph’_ sound, but reburies her face in his wild mess of hair anyway.

“Are you two… friends?” Lupin asks hesitaintly, wringing his hands.

 _“Hey Nagini? Are we friends?”_ He tilts his head to look at where she’s resting on his shoulders.

_“Get that idea out of your head, scarface. You’re fucking delusional.”_

Harry turns back to Lupin, grinning. “We’re friends.”

“Well,” Moody growls, “tell your pet to keep clear of me or she’ll lose more than just a few scales.” His face seems almost sinister in the wandlight, scars casting grotesque shadows across his visage. He vibrates with a cocktail mixture of suspicion, anger, hate and agression, and Harry keeps his wand at the ready, in case Moody makes a wrong move towards Nagini.

 _“Fuck you and your creepy eyeball,”_ Nagini hisses back, clearly disliking being called a pet. Harry agrees with her internally.

“She says fuck you too,” Harry supplies helpfully. He gets a glare in return.

Moody growls.

Nagini hisses.

Harry is reminded of some sort of standoff between arch enemies, the sort in the Wild West movies where two gunslingers stand dramatically across from one another in an abandoned town in the desert and there are just tumbleweeds blowing in between them randomly.

Once again, Harry wonders why this is his life.

When the introductions are over, the others are strangely enthusiastic to leave, which leaves Harry alone in his room to say his goodbyes and pack.

 _“I guess this is goodbye, then. I’ll write to you.”_ Harry says.

Nagini laughs as she slides down onto the bed, releasing Harry from the burden of carrying her, but still keeping part of her body hanging over his shoulders in an act reminiscent of a hug. _“Ha, fuck no, scarface. I am going to adopt you and you will regret ever letting me in that window.”_

Harry grins. _“I guess then I’ll see you next summer holidays then?”_

Nagini’s coils squeeze his shoulders. _“That’s if you survive the next Defense teacher.”_ she says.

_“You know something about them?”_

_“Huh? Nah, probably should have asked when I went back, but oh well. I’m basing that on your previous teachers. There's a seventy-five percent chance of them attempting to kill you, accidental or not, a twenty-five percent chance of them trying to use your fame or obliviate you, and a one hundred percent chance that they’ll be gone by the end of next year.”_

Harry glares at her for the reminder. 

She continues, nonplussed. _“Personally, I’ve bet on them being evil as hell, but they won't be all murdery and shit. Also, I’ve placed even more galleons on them hating you, so please be annoying as hell but don’t get yourself killed, and once the shit hits the fan I'll share a bit of the money with you.”_

 _“I won’t get myself killed, Nagini,”_ Harry says exasperatedly.

 _“Bullshit. Hogwarts is completely unsafe-”_

_“It’s filled with trained wizards and witches so it can’t be that bad.”_

_“-and I know for a fact that they won’t be able to keep you out of trouble-”_

_“I’m not that rebellious Nagini, honestly,”_

_“-much less an entire fuckin' castle of hormonal human teenages. This whole Ministry business is so stupid-”_

_“They’ll realise eventually!”_

_“-plus that senile old twinklefucker-”_

_“Please don’t call Professor Dumbledore that.”_

_“-is sending you away with incompetent idiots while I’m not even allowed to come with you to keep you out of trouble. If anything happened to you-”_

Harry covers Nagini’s mouth with his hand. She licks it. Harry boops her on the nose.

Their camaraderie is interrupted by a series of rapid knocks on the closed door. “I get that you want to say goodbye, Harry, but we need to go soon.” Lupin calls from the other side.

Nagini turns to him again, in all seriousness this time. _“Fine. This is only a temporary goodbye. Don’t get yourself killed and I’ll see you again before you know it. Remember the advice I gave you when you go, scarface.”_

_“That any problem that can be solved with violence, can’t be called a problem?”_ Harry says, grinning.

 _“Well yes,”_ Nagini splutters, _“obviously, but the other thing I told you.”_

_“To deal with people who make cheap shots, you have to make even cheaper shots?”_

_“It’s a useful tip, scarface, but not that.”_

_“That when insulting a man, go after his dick and his reputation?”_

_“Obviously, but that’s just common sense, dumbass. I meant the literal inspiring badass advice I gave you the day after the dementor attack.”_

_“People with no morals reign supreme in the world?”_

Nagini slaps him with her tail. _“Bloody hell, now I know you’re just messing with me.”_

Harry flies away from Number Four Privet Drive with a poorly disguised grin on his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, an intellectual: you get kudos over time as more people read your fic so there is no point in checking every ten minutes
> 
> Also me, refreshing every five seconds after posting, nose pressed to the screen: commente


End file.
